Desolation Flats

by Andrew Hunt

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll see you there.”

  “Thank you, Detective Oveson.”

  She hung up.

  I remained standing in that spot for a half a minute, staring at the big black wall telephone, wondering why on earth Dot Bliss wanted to talk to me at such a late hour. I lowered the phone on the hook, returned to the living room, and instantly transformed into the least popular guy in Salt Lake City when I announced bedtime, accentuating it with a triple clap. Hi and his little sister moaned, but Sarah Jane smirked with all of the self-assurance of a teenager who knew how to maneuver around bedtime rules.

  I told my children to change into their pajamas, brush their teeth, gulp down their drinks of water, and climb into bed. I took Sarah Jane aside and, knowing her night owl proclivities, asked her to keep an eye on things while I went out. She eyed me skeptically when I opened my billfold and handed her a couple of floppy George Washingtons.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s for your troubles,” I said.

  “Why does this feel like you’re paying me not to ask questions?”

  I pushed the bills back into the billfold and started to shove it back in my trouser pocket. “Suit yourself.…”

  “No, wait!” She cracked a grin. “If you insist.”

  I passed her the bills and she tucked them in her shirt pocket.

  “Are you going to tell me where you’re going?”

  “I won’t be gone long.”

  “Does it have to do with Mom?”

  I made a face. “What makes you ask a thing like that?”

  “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Sarah Jane searched for the words. “Her sadness.”

  “You oughtn’t to worry about it,” I said. “Remember what I told you? Don’t carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “You say it so convincingly, Dad.”

  “That’s because your grandma Oveson raised her sons to tell the truth,” I said. “How late you gonna be up till?”

  “It’s a weeknight,” she said. “So no later than one. Maybe half past.”

  I chuckled. “Chip off the old block.”

  “Always will be,” she said. “If I don’t see you later, good night Dad.”

  I kissed her on the forehead.

  “Good night angel. I love you.”

  “I know. Me too, with you.”

  She walked into her bedroom, belly flopped on the bed, kicked her feet up, and opened her book to the place where she left off. I waited in the living room, looking at pictures in Life magazine, until Hi and Emily were asleep, or at least they pretended to be when I peeked in on them. Clara, too, was breathing heavily and did not respond when I whispered her name a couple of times. At about twenty minutes to eleven, I closed the front door behind me, triple checking to make sure it was locked. Then I drove off into the night.

  Twenty

  In a velvety booth in a dimly lit corner of the Airport Café, I peered out the window into the night, counting the lights flashing along the runway. Even at this hour—a little past eleven—airplanes still touched down at the Municipal Airport. Most of the late-night landings involved single-engine buzzers swooping out of the sky to bounce down onto terra firma. The larger commercial flights—the roaring DC-3s and Boeing 247s and Lockheed Super Electras—also arrived at the airport this time of night, but more sporadically than during the daytime. When one of the big ones came down out of the starry heavens, guided by the flashing lights on the runway and the air control tower spotlight, it was something to behold. Those powerful engines made the restaurant tables tremble, silverware clink, and windows vibrate.

  Not one to loiter at an eating establishment without ordering food, I asked the waitress to bring me a banana split. A short time later, she arrived with the largest of its kind I’ve ever seen. I went to work on it with a long dessert spoon, digging my way down the summit. Dot Bliss arrived right at the instant I was starting to doubt she was coming. Once more, she was dressed elegantly, this time in something black that I guessed to be made of velvet, with flared elbow-length sleeves and elaborate bead designs around the bodice. A matching little black hat with bead designs around the brim topped her head. Her high-heeled shoes clacked loudly against the linoleum floor as she approached, and I stood to greet her and shake her hand.

  “Detective Oveson, sorry I’m late.”

  “Don’t think twice about it,” I said. “Call me Art.”

  “As long as you call me Dot.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  She slid into her side of the booth, I into mine.

  “I hope you don’t mind, I started without you,” I said, gesturing to what was left of my banana split. “Want one?”

  She grimaced. “No thank you. I’ll have something to drink.”

  I flagged the waitress. A chipper brunette, young and in a blue linen dress, held a small spiral pad and a pencil poised to jot our order.

  “What would you like?” I asked.

  “Tom Collins, please.”

  The waitress did a double take. “Sorry, the bartender is gone for the night.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Have you any beer?”

  The waitress rattled off a list of brands, foreign and domestic.

  “Is any of that on draft?” asked Dot.

  “Fisher and Becker,” the waitress replied. “Both brewed locally.”

  “I’ll gamble on the Fisher.”

  “Be right back.”

  The waitress darted off in the direction of the bar. Dot pulled an ashtray closer, lit a cigarette, and blew smoke upward. For the briefest of seconds, I thought of Clara smoking this morning, but I shook that thought out of my head.

  “I hope you found your way out here without any problems,” I said.

  “It was no trouble at all. I took a cab.”

  “Good.”

  The waitress arrived carrying a tray balancing a mug of beer and a bowl of pretzels mixed with peanuts. She unloaded the tray, greeted by quiet thanks from Dot, and then vanished from our table as quickly as she appeared. Dot lifted the frosted mug to her lips and sipped, and the foam gave her a fleeting mustache, which vanished with a napkin’s dab.

  “Mmm,” she said, raising her eyebrows, surprised that she’d like it.

  “How is it?”

  “Tasty. Crisp. Want some?”

  “Oh no thanks,” I said. “I’m not much of a drinker.”

  She smiled as she placed her beer on the coaster. “How do you pull that off?”

  “It’s how I’ve always been,” I said. “I don’t know any different.”

  “Do you eat ice cream instead?”

  “I never thought of ice cream as a substitute for anything,” I said. “To me, it’s pure pleasure in and of itself.”

  She laughed in a throaty way that made her bosom quiver. I shouldn’t have noticed that detail, but I did.

  “What?” I asked.

  “For the long journey across the pond, I brought along a book of facts about the United States,” she said. “The part about Utah boasts that it leads the country in ice cream consumption. Is that true?”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “We love our ice cream in these parts.”

  “That much is obvious.” She waited a beat, sizing me up with her eyes. “Listen, thank you for meeting me out here at this late hour. I realize Salt Lake City doesn’t have much of a nightlife.”

  “Oh? Is your hometown hopping at the witching hour?”

  “Where I’m from, the night doesn’t get started until this time,” she said. “I suppose that’s an unfair comparison. London has been around for two thousand years. Salt Lake has been here for—what?”

  “Ninety-one, give or take a few months.”

  “Give it another millennium,” she said, with a sly grin. “You know what they say. Salt Lake City wasn’t built in a day.”

  We both chuckled at that line. Our eyes met.
She was disarmingly beautiful.

  “Is there something you wanted to discuss?” I asked.

  “I had things I wanted to tell you. In person.”

  “Yeah? Such as?”

  “Something isn’t right.”

  I waited for her to continue. She stared at her beer in silence.

  “Can you elaborate?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course. I find the tension in Clive’s entourage unbearable.”

  “What kind of tension?”

  “The combination of Nigel’s murder and Clive going missing has been too much to bear. I fear there’s something sinister at the root of Clive’s disappearance. I don’t believe he’s gone on an errant nature outing.”

  “Sinister how?”

  She stared intently at me as she drew on her cigarette, and the glow of the orange tip reflected in her irises. Blowing smoke, she said, “I believe he was taken.”

  “As in kidnapped? By whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What makes you believe he was kidnapped?”

  “Intuition.”

  “I’m going to need more than that. If what you say is true, this thing will blow wide open. It’ll be splashed all over the papers, the newsreels, the radio. Clive’s face will be everywhere.”

  “They do love celebrities, don’t they?”

  I nodded. “Especially a missing one, like Amelia Earhart. It makes hot copy and sells lots of papers.”

  The waitress returned to our table with a smile that lit up the place.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

  “No thank you,” I said. “I’m stuffed to the gills, I’m afraid.”

  “Wasn’t it any good? Looks like you only ate half of it.”

  “It was the best banana split I’ve ever tasted,” I said. “I get full easily.”

  “Care for a beer?” she asked.

  “No thank you.”

  “Coffee? Tea? Juice? A sandwich maybe?”

  “I’d love a soda water, with lime and a couple of teaspoons of sugar stirred in for good measure.”

  “Coming right up.” She looked at Dot. “Another beer?”

  “No thank you,” said Dot. “I’m fine for now.”

  “Be right back.”

  “Much obliged,” I said.

  Off to get my soda water, the waitress zigzagged around mostly empty tables—there were probably about half a dozen other people in that spacious joint. I spied Dot holding back laughter.

  “What?” I asked.

  “‘Much obliged,’” she said, making her voice deeper and more American sounding. “You talk like they do in the cowboy pictures.”

  “Yeah, well, I live on a steady diet of ’em,” I said, winking. “Back to your theory about Clive being kidnapped.”

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t given me much to go on,” I said. “Other than intuition, feelings of dread, and something or other about tension amongst your fellow travelers.”

  “Is that not sufficient?”

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “By all means.”

  The waitress delivered my soda water. I thanked her and drank half of it in one shot.

  “The pressure got to Clive. He fled. Same way he ran away from Daytona Beach three years ago.” I hesitated to say what I was about to tell her. “There’s something I didn’t mention the other day, when we were all gathered at police headquarters. On Saturday night at the Coconut Grove, Clive asked me to take him to a remote part of Utah, where there are these uncharted canyons that are difficult to explore and aren’t even mapped out yet.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “He seemed to love the idea of going somewhere remote, leaving everything behind, even just for a few days. Maybe he just wanted to clear the cobwebs out of his head.”

  She opened her case, pulled out another cigarette, and tapped it on the silvery surface. She lit it, returned the lighter to her purse, and smoked in silence. She fingernail-picked tobacco off of her tongue.

  “What part of Utah?”

  “An area called the Canyons of the Escalante,” I said.

  “Do you believe he’s alive?”

  “Yes.” I don’t know if I really believed it, but I wanted to reassure her.

  “I wish I shared your optimism,” she said. “I know what these Germans are capable of.”

  “Germans? Who said anything about Germans?”

  “They’re here to stage a propaganda coup. Why do you think they handpicked Rudy Heinrich, a dashing racer who speaks fluent English? They want to demonstrate their superiority to the rest of the world, and show Americans they’re really not so different from them.”

  “So you think they kidnapped Clive to knock him out of the running?”

  “You say it as though it’s far-fetched. Clive abandoned his flirtation with fascism long ago. He represents England now, whereas Heinrich is a symbol of Germany and the so-called master race. I’m sure a victory for the Germans, here on American soil, would thrill Mr. Hitler. It might even make up for the victory of your own Jesse Owens two years ago.”

  “I’ve wondered if there was a connection between Heinrich’s team and Clive’s disappearance.…”

  Her eyes widened, as if she saw something, and she leaned forward and whispered, with shifty eyes: “There is a man seated over in a booth by the window, reading a newspaper.”

  I started to turn my head.

  “Not now,” she hissed. “Give it a minute.”

  An uneasy silence settled over our table, like a pall, giving me time to sip my drink. She slipped me her makeup compact, open with the mirror facing up. She made hand motions, advising me to use it to see the man seated over by the window, so I didn’t have to turn my head directly to him. I positioned the compact on the tablecloth until a wall of newspaper appeared in the mirror. For a long while, the headlines stayed high, blocking my view of his face. When he lowered it to turn the page, I instantly recognized him as Ernst Voss, stony-faced, like Buster Keaton. I snapped the compact closed, placed it flat on the table, and slid it across to her. She slipped it inside of her purse, as if handling something top secret

  She checked her wristwatch. “I should be getting back. I’ll hail a yellow cab out by the curb.”

  “Not on your life,” I said, pulling dollar bills out of my wallet and tossing them on the table to cover our bill and a little extra for a tip. “I’ll give you a ride back.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s on me,” I said.

  “I mean about the ride.”

  “Sure I’m sure. Let’s make ourselves scarce.”

  She mashed her cigarette into the ashtray and the two of us eased out of the booth and headed out of the Airport Café, blending into a dense crowd of arrivals in a terminal so bright it stung my eyes.

  Twenty-one

  Leaving the municipal airport parking lot, I gripped the steering wheel with one hand and switched on the radio with the other. The KDYL Nite Owl Program played a horn-filled selection by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra. A smooth-voiced Kay Weber sang a sentimental love song duet with Bob called “Romance in the Dark.” I thought the music might put Dot Bliss at ease, but she kept glancing backward over her shoulder, fearful we were being followed. I was not helping matters any by repeatedly checking my rearview mirror, scanning for headlights. I spotted a pair a little ways back. Who knows if that car was following us? Seeing Ernst Voss in that restaurant got to me, like it did her. Why was he shadowing me? What interest could he possibly have in where I was going? Or could he be running surveillance on Dot Bliss?

  Something gnawed away at her. She was agitated. Fidgety. Preoccupied. Sighing often. I nearly asked what was eating her, but before I could, she placed her hand on her chest and began panting. In a few seconds, she was hyperventilating, and her breathing sounded labored and the hand on her chest trembled.

  “Pull over,” she said.

  “What’s wrong? Are you OK?” />
  “Now! Please! Right here!”

  On a pitch-black stretch of road, with no streetlamps for miles, I swerved onto the gravel shoulder, and as soon as the car came to a halt, she leapt out the door and stumbled into a ditch. I killed the engine and pursued her. It wasn’t quite pitch-black, but close. The sky was splashed with stars, and on the opposite side of the valley, the lights of Salt Lake City twinkled along the base of the Wasatch Mountains. I hiked down to the bottom of the ditch, where Dot Bliss was sprawled out in tall grass, still breathing heavily, but not quite as dramatically as she’d been in the car. Her hat was on the ground nearby, and I reached down and picked it up. I walked over to where she lay, sat down in the dirt, and set her hat by her side.

  “Are you OK?” I asked again.

  No response came from her, but her breathing slowed, and I noticed fluttering eyelids.

  I lost track of how long we sat in that ditch together. It dipped sufficiently deep into the earth that I could not see the road above us, but every now and then a car could be heard zooming past. At one point, a faraway buzz of propellers hummed, and before long, an airplane roared over our heads, low enough that the glow from its open windows cast light on our grassy trench. The plane touched down on the nearby runway and its deafening engines faded, replaced by the symphony of crickets.

  Dot Bliss sat up cross-legged in the grass, reached for her hat, and fiddled with the brim. Moonlight touched the corner of her face, enough to remind me of her otherworldly beauty, as if I needed a reminder. I waited for her to speak. What does one say to a young, rich, lovely British socialite sitting close by in a roadside ditch?

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wish I brought my purse. I could use a cigarette.”

  “I’ll go get it.”

  I started to stand up.

  “No! Stop! Please, stay here.”

  I plopped back down on my hind end, squirming to get comfy in the dry grass. “What happened?”

  “I get these panic attacks,” she said. “I have difficulty breathing. My heart starts pounding. I get dizzy, disoriented. If I’m in a car or a building when it’s happening, I have to run outside to get some fresh air. Once upon a time, when I was a teenager, I used to carry around a brown paper bag, in case my breathing became labored, like I did back there. My mother told me it was unladylike to carry around a bag with me. She said no man would ever want to marry me if I kept doing it.”