by Andrew Hunt
Cannon stepped aside and turned to Sykes. “Al?”
Sykes nodded and moved up to the podium. The light overhead gleamed on his badge. He read from a dossier. “The victim’s name is Helen Kent Pfalzgraf. Her birth name was Helen Joyce Higginbotham. Date of birth: August the twenty-fourth, 1897. That’d put her at age thirty-two at time of death. Place of birth: Twin Falls, Idaho. Her father, Walter, owned a dry goods store up there. She relocated to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah for one year, where she majored in speech and dramatics. She’s listed in the 1921 Utonian, the University of Utah’s yearbook, under the name Helen Kent, and it says her interests are stage acting, painting, crocheting, and baking. Approximately five and one-half years ago, she married Dr. Hans Pfalzgraf.”
Whispers filled the room when Sykes said the doctor’s name. Pfalzgraf enjoyed a reputation as one of the most successful and revered physicians in Utah, serving primarily an upscale clientele. Sykes glowered at the men as if to say, Cut it out.
“Early word from the coroner’s office indicates Mrs. Pfalzgraf was struck on the head by a heavy object of some sort, which either killed her or knocked her out cold. Then she was run over by her own auto, a nineteen-and-twenty-eight Cadillac, possibly as many as seven times. Her car was later found abandoned in a parking lot on Washington Boulevard in Ogden. Hair and skin samples were removed from the front and rear bumpers of the auto, and they matched Mrs. Pfalzgraf’s hair and skin. We aren’t sure if robbery was a motive. Some of Mrs. Pfalzgraf’s jewels were stolen, including her wedding ring, but the assailant—or assailants—left a lot of jewelry on her and left her purse in her car, which contained six hundred and twenty-five dollars in cash.” Sykes closed his dossier. “That’s all for now. We’ll share any additional information with you as soon as we are privy to it ourselves.”
Sykes stepped aside to make room for Cannon, who pressed his plump stomach against the lectern. “Teams of men will comb the area around Pole Line Road and up in Ogden where her Cadillac was found. Because the crime occurred outside city limits, it falls into county sheriff’s jurisdiction. Still, I anticipate our friends over at the Public Safety Building”—that was Cannon’s way of saying “the police,” as the Public Safety Building housed the Salt Lake City Police Department—“will horn in on this case if they haven’t already started to do so. Stay vigilant, keep an eye out for clues, and report back to Sykes or myself at all times. Constant updates are a must. Understand?”
Scattered yeses greeted his question. “Gents, go out and do good.”
While deputies streamed out of the briefing room, I heard my name called.
At the front of the room, Sheriff Cannon smiled at me, hands on his hips. “Can I have a word with you?”
Roscoe frowned, and I arched my eyebrows at him, then walked over to Cannon with Roscoe following.
“Just you, Oveson. Lund, maybe you can wait outside.”
Roscoe eyed me, and I tipped my head, as if to say, What choice do you have?
He scowled for a second at Cannon, but the sheriff was too focused on the mostly empty room to notice. The grin stayed on his face as his eyes met mine and he said, “Let’s walk and talk. The walls have ears.”
* * *
We found our way to the least desirable place in the entire building: the boiler room, hidden in the southeast corner of the basement. It being a cold day, the boiler was working overtime, and through the iron grate I could see rows of flames blasting away inside. The subterranean stone room was filled with noise—metal clanking, hissing steam, crackling flames—and inside of a minute, I was wiping the sweat off my brow with my sleeve.
Cannon turned to me. That smile didn’t go anywhere as he held up a pack of Lucky Strikes and tipped it toward me. “Cigarette?”
“No thanks. I don’t smoke.”
He shook the package so a tip jutted out, and he put it between his lips. When he lit the cigarette, his face glowed for a few seconds before he closed the lighter and blew smoke at the boiler. “The missus doesn’t care for me partaking, so I do it strictly in private.”
“Yes, sir.”
He blew smoke toward the ceiling. “I like you, Oveson. You’re ambitious, but your ambitions don’t conflict with mine.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I knew your father. He and I were friends—sort of.”
“He spoke highly of you,” I said. It was a lie. Dad never once mentioned Cannon. I had misgivings about lying, but I knew with a man like Cannon, a compliment always builds trust.
Cannon arched his eyebrows, genuinely surprised. “Oh yeah? What’d he say?”
“He told me you’re a fine lawman.”
“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Darn good fellow, your father. My condolences on his passing. It was awful—him getting gunned down. What’s it been? Fifteen, sixteen years?”
Being reminded of my father’s death filled me with an unexpected sadness, yet I hid it well. “Yeah, about that. Was there something you wished to talk to me about, sir?”
As he spoke, the glowing tip of his cigarette jumped up and down. “I remember when this city used to stop at Fourth South and everything beyond that was farms and houses. You probably weren’t even born yet.”
“I’m sure I wasn’t.”
He plucked his cigarette out of his lips and blew smoke. “Now they’re building out beyond Twenty-first and the streetcars run clear out to Murray. It’s crazy how much this town has changed since I was a youngster.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Salt Lake City isn’t what it used to be. It’s no longer the City of Saints. It hasn’t been for a long time. Place is full of crime.” He paused and looked me up and down. “I guess you know about Lorenzo Blackham?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you know about him?”
“I see his billboards by the side of the road. I know he’s running for sheriff.”
Cannon nodded. “He’s campaigning dirty—real below-the-belt stuff. Bastard is making speeches about Hazel Hamilton, saying I never even tried to find her killer. It gets me, Oveson. It really gets me. Then there was that brouhaha two years ago, which he insists on calling a scandal. Scandal, my foot! Wun’t no scandal. All in the heck we done was tax gamblers. Sure, there was some arbitrariness about the whole setup, but that was our way of pushing the bad element out of the city.”
I considered saying, It wasn’t a tax. It was extortion, and you personally pocketed all the money and fired six deputies who were in on it with you.
I didn’t. I wanted to stay employed. “Yes, sir.”
“The Pfalzgraf murder has brought everything to a head. Things like that aren’t supposed to happen in Salt Lake City. This is a big-city homicide. New York, L.A., Chicago—sure, but not in this place.”
He smoked for a moment. “I’m already getting calls from newspapers, asking a lot of dang fool questions…”
His sentence tapered off so he could take a final drag of his cigarette. He dropped it on the floor and mashed it with his heel. “If this case isn’t solved right away, Blackham will use it against me. I need someone I trust working on it—someone who’ll keep me posted. I’m thinking of you.”
I arched my eyebrows in surprise, and said, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you working on the case, but I also want you to be my eyes and ears with the other deputies. I got a feeling a lot of them have it in for me.”
“Are you asking me to spy for you?”
“I don’t like the word ‘spy.’ It makes you sound like Mata Hari or something. I want to keep it low-key. There’s an election coming up, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down. I need you to update me on the performance of my deputies out in the field. You have to lead by example on this investigation. Show the other fellows how it’s done. They need to see someone with a positive work ethic.”
I managed a grin. “Yes, sir.”
I turned to leave, but Cannon said, “Oh, and Art?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Do whatever it takes to find Mrs. Pfalzgraf’s killer. Dig up what you can. Report your findings regularly to me. Understand?”
I nodded. “What about my partner?”
“Oh, I know all about Lund. Real hothead. Used to be a paid strikebreaker. Loved cracking skulls. He’s muscle, and you look like you could use some muscle. Just keep a leash on him.”
Easier said than done, I thought. I said, “I’ll try, sir.”
“Good man. You’re my eyes and ears, Oveson. Don’t let me down.” He patted me on the shoulder. “I do right by those who’re loyal to me. You’ll see.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll bear that in mind.”
Four
Everything emanated from the temple.
On the northern side of the oval Salt Lake Valley, the earliest Mormon arrivals set aside ten acres for what they called Temple Square. In those days, the valley was full of dry grass, meandering creeks, and trees—firs, quaking aspen, horse chestnuts, box elders, and others. Brigham Young selected the exact spot for the temple on July 28, 1847, four days after he looked out at this valley and told his traveling companions, “This is the right place.” The prophet oversaw the groundbreaking ceremony six years later, but he had no idea at the time that the temple wouldn’t be dedicated for another forty years.
The Salt Lake Temple, as it came to be known, was under construction for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. My grandfather Samuel Oveson found work on one of the many crews, laying the foundation and carving quartz monzonite. The work strained Grandpa Sam’s muscles and ate up big chunks of his time, and the job wasn’t steady. In fact, long periods passed without any progress, and there were times when Grandpa and other locals wondered if the temple would ever be completed. Meantime, Sam’s younger brother, Lyman, was one of the workers in Little Cottonwood Canyon, south of the temple site, chipping away the canyon walls and hauling monzonite twenty miles to the temple grounds.
The coming of the Transcontinental Railroad sped up the transportation of the massive gray blocks from Little Cottonwood. The prophet, in fact, ordered the construction of a temporary railway line that fed straight into Temple Square, which gave Grandpa Sam and Uncle Lyman more work laying track. Sadly, Brigham Young never lived to see the completion of the temple he envisioned. The prophet died on August 29, 1877. The temple, with three towering spires on the east side topped by the gleaming Angel Moroni blowing his trumpet, was dedicated on the sixth day of April, 1893, by then-Prophet Wilford Woodruff, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When I say everything emanated from the temple, I mean the city’s founders created an orderly grid and chose the temple as its epicenter. They built streets wide—so wide, in fact, that early visitors to the City of Saints couldn’t help but marvel at them. Every prestigious journeyer, from explorer Richard Burton to author Mark Twain to moving picture comic Charles Chaplin, voiced astonishment over the size of the city’s streets. On the other hand, the men and women who lived their entire lives here seldom, if ever, stopped and thought about the streets. Salt Lakers were used to them, the way they were used to the tall buildings that had been sprouting downtown since the 1870s.
Salt Lake City was my city, just as it had been my grandfather’s city in the last century. I knew each corner and every side street. I walked its dusty roads and absorbed its history, soaking up every seemingly trivial piece of information. Its people—even the odd and crazy ones—had a familiarity about them that I found comforting. By 1930, Salt Lake City had grown to 145,000 inhabitants within the city proper. That didn’t count all of the nearby hamlets dotting the valley: West Jordan over at the base of the Oquirrhs; Murray in the dead center of the valley; and Sandy—mostly farms and scattered wood-frame houses, with the occasional dry goods store and filling station—built against the Wasatch Mountains to the south.
Those of us in the sheriff’s department did most of our work in these outlying areas, outside the city limits but still inside the county. I guessed much of the Helen Kent Pfalzgraf investigation would keep us within the city proper, which is where I was that day when I drove east on South Temple, in the direction of Salt Lake City’s ritziest neighborhood. South Temple was the street of the nouveau riche in Salt Lake City: mining tycoons, newspaper owners, men who had struck it rich in one western enterprise or another and built palaces that served as conspicuous reminders of their newfound wealth.
I drove too fast through the falling snow, but Roscoe didn’t object. I was preoccupied the entire way, and he seemed lost in his thoughts as well—stone-faced, staring out the window at the mansions. I could not be bothered with him right now. I still felt squeamish over my conversation with Sheriff Cannon earlier that morning. Why did he choose me as his go-to man? What was he really hoping to get out of me? I hardly knew Cannon, and he had a bad rep. The first time we met was the previous year, for my job interview. Since then, he’d only ever said about a half-dozen words to me, most of them variations of “Howdy.”
The Pfalzgraf mansion was near the corner of South Temple and 1300 East, at the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, close to Federal Heights, Salt Lake City’s most affluent neighborhood. Pfalzgraf commissioned a castle for himself and hired a high-priced New York architect who designed a French Chateauesque building made out of polished limestone, with rounded towers on both sides of the front and stone columns on the portico. Rumor had it the house cost $350,000 to build, which in 1916 was a lot. Still is, fourteen years later.
We reached the mansion gates, and there were several cars and a truck parked out front. Newspaper reporters with press passes tucked in their hatbands paced on the sidewalks and street. A scuffed black camera, emblazoned with a label that read MOVIETONE NEWS, and below that WESTERN ELECTRIC SOUND, was attached to the top of a wooden tripod, and a cameraman filmed exterior shots of the mansion. When the reporters noticed we were from the sheriff’s office, they started shouting questions at us.
“J. L. Crabb, Los Angeles Times. I have a few questions…”
“Can you give us any new information about the Pfalzgraf murder?”
“Any updates?”
“What’s the latest word on Dr. Pfalzgraf?”
“We’ve heard allegations that Mrs. Pfalzgraf kept a separate bank account containing a large sum of money. Any truth to this?”
Roscoe shoved a reporter who got too close. “Touch me again and I’ve got a blackjack with your name written on it!”
I excused my way to the gates. Snowflakes fell on my face and melted when they touched skin. I recognized the man standing behind the bars—Floyd Samuelson—dressed in a black security guard’s uniform and matching cap. Hired muscle. He smiled when he saw me. He was a redhead with blushing cheeks, a squared-off chin, and hospitable green eyes. He and I attended the police academy together, and I recall him fervently trying to convert all of the non-Mormons in our graduating class to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I heard the Salt Lake City Police Department skipped over him because they thought he wasn’t smart enough. Ogden and Provo also said no. He was a nice enough man, but his lack of smarts—book smarts, street smarts—made me think maybe he deserved those police department rejection notices. From everything I’d heard, he had done pretty well as a rental guard at the Pfalzgraf house for the past two years.
“Hello, Art!”
I slipped gloved fingers between the iron bars, and we shook hands. “Floyd. How’s every little thing?”
“Busy as bees. This murder is the biggest thing that’s happened in Utah.” He raised his eyebrows, as if remembering something important. He fished out a billfold, opened it, and held up a picture of a chubby boy in a Buster Brown suit. “His name is Elbert Snow Samuelson. We call him Bert. This was taken a year ago. He’s taller now.”
I smiled at the picture. “Cute.”
“Ain’t he, though? I’m so proud of him.” He tucked the wallet away. “Yeah. We’ve had press pe
ople camped out here all day. There was one fella from a pulp magazine, Real Mystery Stories, who actually went and climbed the wall. Police came and hauled him downtown. I don’t mind, though. The doc’s misfortune is puttin’ meat and potatoes on my table. I’m working double shifts, and it looks like I’m gonna be in a newsreel.”
“That’s grand, Floyd.” I winked at him. “We’d like to ask the doctor a few questions, if we can.”
Floyd leaned in close to me and whispered so the reporters couldn’t hear. “Doc slipped off to work. He’s at County, on Twenty-first. He also has an office at Brooks Arcade on State. Second floor. But he’s a busy man. Not easy to catch.”
“What about his daughter?” asked Roscoe.
Floyd went white, as if somebody’d shot his dog. “How do you know about his daughter?”
“Because you just told me, you stupid sonofabitch. Besides, I see the papers. Her mug turns up in the society page all the time. Her old man is always trying to one-up her last birthday party.”
“Anna’s in awful shape,” said Floyd in a nervous voice. “She and Helen were like sisters. She’s holed up in her room, not eating anything.”
“Can we have a few words with her?” I asked.
Floyd shook his head, and clouds of steam shot out his nostrils. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
I looked at him and said, “You can either let us in or I can ask Judge Bringhurst to swear out a warrant. You decide.”
He stared a long second, then fumbled for a ring of keys and stuck one into the gate’s padlock. He slid the iron bars wide enough for me to squeeze through, followed by Roscoe. The press hounds moved in and shouted out questions as Floyd closed and padlocked the gate.
The three of us trudged through the snow. “Pfalzgraf’s lawyer is Parley Tanner,” said Floyd. “He’s doing all the talking, and believe me, it isn’t much.”
