City of Saints

by Andrew Hunt

“That night at the Great Salt Lake, when we found Considine’s body. You and Roscoe were talking about something. What was it?”

  I dodged the question with one of my own. “Is Roscoe going to make it?”

  Buddy shrugged. “Doc says a lot depends on how he fares tonight. He lost quite a bit of blood between the time he was shot and when the ambulance boys wheeled him in here. He’s had several transfusions, and now they’re just waiting to see if it takes. All we can do now is wait and see.” Buddy’s eyes widened. “One other thing. When Roscoe first came in, he said he didn’t get a good look at the driver’s face, but he’s pretty sure he shot him in the left hand.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “The left hand, huh?”

  Buddy nodded. “Apparently, the driver slowed and shot Roscoe with a pistol in his right hand. While he was doing this, he kept his left hand braced against the outside of his car door to support himself. Before Roscoe got put under with anesthetic, he said he fired a round and thought the bullet passed through the shooter’s hand and lodged in the car door.”

  I watched the doctor lift Roscoe’s eyelid, click on a small flashlight, and check both eyes. He shut off and pocketed the flashlight and scribbled on Roscoe’s chart. The motionless Roscoe reminded me of a dead man, just lying there in that hospital bed, hardly even breathing.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” said Buddy.

  “What question?”

  “That night at the Great Salt Lake, when we found Considine’s body, what were you two talking about?”

  “It was personal,” I said. “I don’t want to share it just yet.”

  “You want to know what I think?” asked Buddy. I watched him and waited. “This shooting outside of Grand Central wasn’t random. Somebody targeted Roscoe. My hunch is that it has to do with whatever it was that brought you out to the Great Salt Lake that night. I want some answers, Art. You and I have known each other a long time, but that won’t stop me from arresting you if I have to. And then you can kiss any prospects of a police job good-bye.”

  He waited for a reply, staring intently at me. I just blinked in the direction of Roscoe, in that cold room, without any family or friends there to support him. I felt a deep sorrow in my heart. I wanted to be there for him right then, but with all of those police around, I knew I had no choice but to leave.

  Buddy finally shook his head and sighed. “Have it your way, for now. You can either put all your cards on the table with me, Art, or I’ll get to the bottom of all this on my own. One way or another, I’ll find what I’m looking for.”

  He reached in his pocket, took out a key chain holding four dangling keys, and handed it to me. “When Roscoe came to, and started calling your name, the last thing he said before he went back under is he asked if you would stop by his apartment and feed his cat, Barney. He named you specifically. The black door key will do the trick. His place is on the corner of Eighth East and Second South.”

  I nodded and stuffed the keys in my coat pocket. He said, “If you change your mind and want to help me out, Art, I’d look upon your actions very favorably.”

  We shook hands. “Thanks for calling me, Buddy. I’ll take your offer into consideration.”

  As I was heading away, past nurses and patients in wheelchairs and the sick on gurneys, I heard him say, “Don’t take too long to think it over.”

  * * *

  In the early morning hours, I pulled up to the curb in front of a two-story brick apartment building at the northwest corner of 800 East and 200 South. Inside, at the foot of a staircase, I came across four mailboxes. One—apartment 201—had Roscoe’s name taped to it. I ran up the flight of stairs to 201, opened the door, and switched lights on. The place was small and cluttered, with an electric light globe dangling from a cord in the ceiling. The front room had a small matching couch and armchair. Stacks of magazines were everywhere. Back issues of The National Police Gazette and National Geographic, Modern Radio and Scribner’s, Thrilling Detective and Real Western Tales. An orange tabby came trotting out of the bedroom. He leaped onto the couch and got on the armrest, arching his back for me to pet him. I reached over and ran my hand across his soft fur, and he purred loudly and meowed at me.

  “You must be Barney. Dinner’s coming.”

  I switched on a light in the kitchen—which was really a tiny kitchenette with turquoise and white tiles, a modern gas stove, an icebox, and cabinet doors with glass windows. I searched the cupboards for Barney’s food. There wasn’t much in there: a few clean cups and plates, a sugar bowl, a box of cookies, a can of soup, and a can of tuna fish in oil. I came upon a blue box of Purr-Fect Cat Food with a grinning cartoon cat on the front. I poured some in Barney’s dish, and he came running to it and began eating voraciously, like a starving cat. I found a bottle of milk in the icebox, uncapped and sniffed it (alright), and poured some in the next bowl over for Barney.

  “Bon appétit.”

  I was about to shut off the lights and leave Roscoe’s apartment when I spotted what appeared to be a scrapbook on a little table next to the couch. I sat down on the couch, reached for the book, and opened it. The first photo was an oval-shaped picture of a boy who looked like Roscoe standing beside a pretty woman in one of those big, puffy, turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl dresses. Pages rattled as I turned them. Roscoe as a teenager in front of a boardinghouse. Roscoe standing beside a biplane with an aviator hat and goggles. Roscoe in his doughboy uniform. Roscoe in a Stetson and three-piece suit, standing with four other men dressed similarly, wearing a gold star on his chest. A yellowing certificate with a gold seal from Donovan & Sons of Denver, Colorado. This certifies that Roscoe Henry Lund has attained the rank of detective for the firm of Randolph Donovan & Sons in the year … In pen someone had written 1909 on the certificate.

  The cat pounced in my lap, licking his chops. That was my cue to put the scrapbook away, despite my burning curiosity to learn more about Roscoe. I closed it and placed it on the table where I found it. I petted the cat awhile, and he kept pressing his head and arched back against me.

  “You must be starving,” I said to him, as if he understood my words. I let out a slight chuckle, a forlorn laugh if ever there was one. “Hey, want some tuna?”

  Barney chased me into the kitchen, and I found a can opener and opened the lonely can of tuna, then scooped flakes into Barney’s bowl with a fork. Barney went to work on the tuna, loving every morsel. I crouched and petted him while he ate.

  “I must’ve been crazy, thinking I could tackle this mess,” I said to Barney. “It’s bigger than me. If all those deputies and police working on the case couldn’t crack it, what made me think I could? Maybe I’ll take that dispatcher job in Provo. Who knows? I might end up getting promoted to patrolman. Better than nothing. Wouldn’t you agree, Barney?” I shook my head and sighed. “If you think this town is dull, wait till you see Provo. Grass growing is the most exciting thing going on there.”

  I picked the can of tuna up off the counter. “Maybe I can find some tinfoil to cover the rest…”

  That is when it hit me. I ran my fingers over the jagged edge of the can and thought of those cans that stored film reels. “It’s a can.”

  The words that Scotty Alexander spoke at Keeley’s ice cream parlor echoed in my head. I keep my cans in the hurricane.

  It was too late at night to act on my hunch. It would have to wait until morning.

  * * *

  Monday bright and early, I arrived at the Newhouse Hotel, room 805, a little too late.

  Intermountain Mining Speculators was no more.

  I jimmied the lock with my set of picks and made my way inside. The place was deserted. Movers had carted out all of the office furniture and filing cabinets. All that remained was crumpled pieces of paper littered on the floor and a disconnected candlestick telephone sitting on a solitary chair.

  I had another idea. Nearby, the federal building on Main housed an office of the Department of the Interior, which kept records on Utah mines, inclu
ding lists of deed holders. Interior maintained a sizable presence in Utah, monitoring fish and wildlife, overseeing water and mineral rights, and conducting public land transfers. They took up a big chunk of the first floor of the federal building.

  I walked down the linoleum halls, stopping at double doors with UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR on the frosted glass. I entered to find a rawboned fellow with hair parted in the center and a prominent Adam’s apple at the front desk.

  “Welcome to the Department of the Interior,” he said with a toothy grin. “May I help you?”

  I closed the door and surveyed the plush office with wood paneling and framed photographs of scenic Utah places. The place felt like the inside of an icebox. They kept the air conditioner blasting frigid winds, despite chilly weather outside.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m looking for a mine. How do you keep them cataloged?”

  “By reference number, by county, by type, and by status—active versus inactive,” he said. He heard my sigh and noticed my look of discouragement.

  “No site names?” I asked.

  “I might be able to help you,” he said, holding his hand to his chest in a slightly prissy manner. “Was there a particular mine you were looking for?”

  “Yeah. It may—or may not—be called Hurricane.”

  “Right off the top of my head I know that we have two Hurricanes in Utah, one in Daggett County and one in Summit.” He closed his eyes tightly, as if deep in thought. “The Daggett mine is copper and operational. It’s owned by the Great West Mining Company, which is headquartered in San Francisco. The Summit County mine was classified as inactive, but someone purchased it a few years ago, I believe. A private individual. I’m not as good with names, I’m afraid.”

  “C. W. Alexander?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to check. The mine was mixed mineral—zinc, gold, silver, lead, and, uh, possibly copper.”

  “How on earth do you remember all this stuff?”

  He let out a high-pitched giggle, tilted forward, and whispered, “That’s my job. Be right back.”

  I waited, pacing and whistling. A beautiful framed photograph of Arches National Monument caught my eye—a giant sandstone fin jutting out of the desert floor, taken with color film that turned the sky into a saturated blue and brought out the splashes of reds and oranges in the rocks.

  The clerk returned with a red leather-bound book and placed it on the desk near his typewriter. He opened it and licked his fingers as he turned pages. “Records of land transfer,” he said in response to my quizzical stare. “Here we go. It says here the Hurricane Number Eight was sold in 1925—Monday, August the tenth, to be exact—to a Mister Clyde W. Alexander. The address is given as the Newhouse Building here in town. He purchased the mine from Tintic Enterprises for the sum of fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “So it wasn’t cheap.”

  He looked at me and shrug-tilted his head. “I’m guessing it probably still had a lot of deposits. There’s also a mill on the site, which probably added to the cost.”

  “Does that give the exact location?” I asked.

  He looked down and ran his finger along a list of pencil notations. “It gives longitude and latitude coordinates.” He reached behind his desk and opened another hardcover book. “When in doubt, consult with the atlas. It should help.”

  He paid close attention to the atlas for a minute, then jotted on a pad of paper, tore off the sheet, and handed it to me. Directions: how to get to the Hurricane mine from the Salt Lake Valley.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said. “You’ve been so helpful.”

  “Please,” he said, blushing and wiggling a few fingers. “This is my job. It’s what I get paid for. Have a pleasant day, sir.”

  “You, too. Thanks again,” I said, taking the piece of paper with me.

  Twenty-two

  I came upon the mill late in the morning. The rusted-out building—brown streaks on gray, with broken windows—had been built into the side of a pine-tree-covered peak, and now that most of the snow had melted, the first weeds were poking out of the earth. Give it till July, I thought, and tall grass will overrun this place.

  A newspaper headline stared up at me from the passenger seat. SALT LAKE POLICEMAN CAUGHT IN MIDNIGHT AMBUSH. Subhead: OFFICER IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING MYSTERY SHOOTING. Earlier in the morning, I’d visited Roscoe in the hospital, but he was sleeping when I arrived, and I didn’t want to wake him. The doctor assured me Roscoe was still in critical condition. I left for the ninety-minute drive to the mine, stopping at Roscoe’s apartment to feed Barney on the way.

  At the Hurricane, I parked my car, locked the doors, and started up a path, sizing up the neglected place. I had on my Stetson, held a flashlight in my right hand, and carried a pair of long, coiled ropes draped over my left elbow. I explored the mill grounds, taking a guess at the construction date based on its corrugated metal siding and brittle girders. I thought 1890s but couldn’t be sure.

  A pair of abandoned water tanks at the top of the hill overlooked the desolate structure. I peeked through an opening in the wall, and it looked to me as though the furnace and boiler, both tipped over in the mud, had become chipmunk dwellings. I continued up a stony embankment, my feet slipping occasionally on the way, until I reached a set of corroded ore-car tracks that dipped into a ravine. I followed them all the way to the black, rectangular mine entrance, framed by ancient timber.

  I passed a chunk of wood as tall as me that had a tin sign nailed to it with letters so bold you could not possibly miss them. DANGER: UNSAFE MINE—STAY OUT, STAY ALIVE!

  I arrived at the opening in the side of the mountain. More signs: DO NOT ENTER. BEWARE DEEP SHAFTS. DANGER: CAVING GROUND. Finally: ENTRANCE PROHIBITED. I got the picture—but not enough to stop me from going on this fool’s errand.

  Time to switch on the flashlight. The beam danced around in the mine, illuminating the craggy rounded walls. I was deep inside now, feeling uneasy about the daylight diminishing with each step I took.

  I kept going, driven by an inner compulsion I did not understand, passing under heavy beams and soon rounding a corner. I switched off my flashlight for a moment and, just as I suspected, stood in total blackness. I could not see my hand in front of my face, and the only thing I could hear was my breathing.

  I turned the flashlight back on and continued.

  Deeper … deeper … deeper …

  Following the rails … taking each step carefully …

  It was not my imagination. The ceiling was getting lower. The walls were closing in. I stopped, still as a statue in the stale air, sensing movement above. Tipping the ray of the battery-powered light upward, I felt my worst phobia flare up as I surveyed a thousand furry black pods dangling from the ceiling. I lowered my flashlight, and my heart sputtered like an airplane engine.

  “Oh no,” I whispered to myself, my body shaking. “Bats. What am I going to do? OK—alright—OK. Take a deep breath, Oveson. They don’t like you any more than you like them.”

  It took every bit of strength in me to press on into the bowels of the earth.

  I maneuvered my feet as stealthily as I could. At one point, my shoe crunched glass. Somebody had busted a soda pop bottle on the tracks. I avoided aiming the flashlight at the ceiling, yet I could still sense bats quivering over my head.

  The tunnel widened dramatically into a cavernous stope where all of the ore had been extracted to carve out an area with cathedral-high ceilings. In the center of the room, water dripped from the ceiling into a crystal pool. The air smelled and tasted bitter, and I began to worry about what was in it. I took off my Stetson, reached in my pocket, pulled out a cloth face mask, put it over my nose and mouth, and secured it in place by pulling its rubber strap over and behind my head. I put my Stetson back on.

  I now faced a trio of drifts, each a possible hiding spot for C. W. Alexander’s box of films. Or maybe, I thought, Alexander did not actually hide his films down in the min
e. Maybe he hid them somewhere else. But why would he tell his son that he hid his cans in the hurricane if … I could tear myself up asking these sorts of questions, and what good would it do? I approached the three timber-reinforced openings, my heart racing.

  Which direction should I go? “Stop wondering and start searching,” I told myself. I picked the middle drift and walked for a ways, holding my flashlight at chest level, waving the beam right, then left. I closed my eyes and said, “Heavenly Father, help me make the right decision…”

  My shoe soles scraped gravel. It only made my jitters worse that the floor on either side of the ore cart tracks dropped at a forty-five-degree angle into deep crevices. My flashlight beam danced. I turned it up at the ceiling. “Good,” I said aloud. “No bats—”

  I halted and held my breath. No bats may mean poison gas, I thought. I considered turning back, but I had come this far and was still in one piece, so I continued forward.

  Twenty feet later, I saw it, hidden in a level nook: a cardboard box, a couple of feet high by a couple of feet wide, sealed shut by strands of twine wrapped around it. I pointed my flashlight at a label: CLYDE ALEXANDER, C.O. INTERMOUNTAIN MINING SPECULATORS, LTD., NEWHOUSE HOTEL, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH.

  “Thank God.”

  As I said that, a timber brace groaned like a ghost, and dust and tiny particles fell from the ceiling.

  Silence. I tipped my flashlight up at the rotten timber and caught my breath. Then I lifted the box. It was heavy enough that I needed both arms to carry it, but I was still able to hold the flashlight in my right hand while I walked.

  Balancing the box and flashlight was tough. My strides grew longer, and the dust-filled light beam bounced more dramatically as I picked up the pace.

  Then it happened.

  My flashlight went out. Everything went blacker than black.

  I lowered the box to the ground and began fiddling with the flashlight, but I couldn’t see anything. I was one hundred percent blind. My hands shook something fierce. I panicked, silently reprimanding myself for not bringing a backup flashlight. I shook the flashlight, switched it on and off, screwed and unscrewed the battery cap, tried switching it on again. Still nothing.