by Andrew Hunt
“Follow me. I’ll do the talking.”
I turned the knob and pushed the door open. A brass bell rang. Inside, my eyes adjusted as I moved forward between shelves of flowers on either side in all shapes and colors. The temperature plunged thirty degrees, thanks to a walk-in refrigerator with its door wide open. I could see that it housed a huge supply of roses. Roscoe came in after me and assumed a tough-guy pose near the entrance. At least he’d tucked in his shirt and appeared more presentable. In the rear of the store, four women sat at a long wooden table, wrapping bouquets in paper, taping them closed, and cutting ribbons with scissors. They ranged in age—I guessed—from twenties to fifties, with their braided hair pinned back in buns, wearing pale blue home-sewn dresses that reached their ankles. Behind them, a door opened and I recognized Carl Jeppson, an apostle in the fundamentalist sect. You couldn’t mistake him for anybody else, thanks to a receding widow’s peak, high cheekbones, and a scar that formed a fault from his nostril to his mouth where he once had a cleft lip. He was sweating profusely, as if he’d emerged from a steam bath, and the whites of his eyes had gone pink.
“Hello,” I greeted him.
“May I help you?”
“Are you Carl Jeppson?”
“Yes. Is something the matter?”
I took out a black leather wallet and showed the badge inside. “Lieutenant Arthur Oveson, Salt Lake City Police Department. You’re under arrest.”
His face lost all color. “What on earth for?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Roscoe, who now stood by my side, beat me to it.
“Polygamy, which is a violation of state laws,” he said. “We have a warrant from Judge Nestor Bringhurst to search—”
“How dare you come inside my shop and disrupt my business!”
I motioned to Kimball, who moved past me, maneuvered behind Jeppson, and began to cuff his wrists. Jeppson started flailing before Kimball could finish. “See here, you can’t do this!”
“Give me your hand.” Kimball lunged for Jeppson’s arm and twisted it downward, causing Jeppson to groan in dismay. Metal rattled and snapped and then the handcuffs were on securely. Jeppson looked like he was about to start sobbing.
“This is an outrage!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “My attorney is Granville Sondrup! He’s in the McCornick Block on First and Main. Fifth floor. Telephone Wasatch one-zero-seven-nine. What are your names again?”
“Lieutenant Arthur Oveson.”
“Detective Roscoe Lund.”
He growled between clenched teeth. “This time tomorrow, you two will be picking up litter, if you’re still employed at all!”
I blinked at him and said nothing, yet I felt the hatred—toward him and his entire way of life—welling up in me. Roscoe stayed quiet, too—a rare show of restraint for someone usually so quick with a snide comeback.
Kimball motioned for two officers to escort Jeppson to the paddy wagon. Jeppson bucked and writhed as the men led him past me. “This is a calamity!” he cried. “I have a reputation in this community! This place has been in business since 1910! How dare you! My attorney is Sondrup! S-O-N-D-R-U-P. First name, Granville. G-R-A-N-V-I-double L-E.”
It took two patrolmen to load the twisting, hollering Jeppson into the back of the idling wagon. I followed them out to the curb and watched them carry out the grim task with quiet determination. Even after they closed the rear doors, I could still hear muffled shouts. “You’ll hear from my attorney! You’ll rue this day! So help me…” The wagon roared off on the short drive to Public Safety.
Reluctantly, I went back inside to the four women seated at the table at the back of the room. Roscoe was already leaning against the counter, scrutinizing their every move. They had stopped wrapping bouquets and were frozen like statues, doing their best to avoid eye contact with me. They shared the same forlorn expression, and they seemed to stare blankly down at the work awaiting them. I’m sure I was the last person they wanted to see at that moment. Still, some part of me yearned to make nice with them, to assure them that I did not mean any harm. When I reached up to tip my hat, I startled the youngest of the four, who was probably in her twenties and already trembling.
“Ladies,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to your work.”
One of the older women, round-faced with sunken eyes and dark gray hair, raised her head, frowning, resisting tears.
“It’s not enough that he was excommunicated,” she said. “Now you come in here and drag him out of his place of business, like he’s a … a … a common criminal.”
“Quit your bellyaching. He’s a suspect in a homicide investigation,” said Roscoe.
I glared at Roscoe and gave a little headshake to show my disapproval of his “bellyaching” comment.
“He has children!” she yelled, rising to her feet. “He didn’t harm anybody!”
The woman beside her, young and frail in appearance, rose and squeezed the gray-haired woman’s arm and pulled her back. “Please, Hilda. It won’t do any good.”
Hilda’s shoulders drooped and she began convulsing with sobs. She sat back down, followed by her petite coworker.
“Are you his wives?” I asked the women.
“Don’t answer him,” cautioned Hilda through a veil of tears.
The women stayed silent. I had no desire to remain in that shop a second longer. My conflicted feelings of guilt and hostility—the former for disrupting their lives, the latter from my dislike of polygamy—jousted in my mind and my heart as I watched those women resuming work, cutting strips of brown paper with scissors, taping the wrapping around bouquets, tying shiny colored ribbon around the packages, and not a single one acknowledging my presence.
Nothing left for me to say or do here. I faced Kimball. “His office is in back,” I said. “I presume your men have been briefed about what to look for?”
“Yes, sir,” said Kimball. “The captain informed us.”
“Good. Put a couple of men on it and let’s get out of here.”
“Yes, sir.”
I gave the women at the long table a backward glance on my way out, with Roscoe tailing close behind. I sensed they were pleased to see us leaving, although they couldn’t have been half as relieved as I was when I walked out of that shop. From a young age, I’d been taught that polygamists were deviants and not true to the current church. At that moment, I felt overwhelming feelings of hostility toward these people churning inside of me. Roscoe grinned at me as he stuffed a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. He didn’t care. Cynicism with two cubes of apathy was more his cup of tea. Unlike me, he was not saddled with the burden of being a true believer.
* * *
“This is it. Slow down.”
Officer Kimball swerved to the curb and into the shadow of an enormous old tree near the corner of Third Avenue and T Street. Behind us, the police cars and the paddy wagon that had barely deposited Jeppson at the jail imitated our move. The vehicles halted in front of a two-story bungalow, brick on the first floor and shingles on the second, with a long columned porch surrounded by low-trimmed shrubs. I picked up the newspaper on the seat between Kimball and me and unfolded it. The banner at the top said TRUTH in old English calligraphy, and below it were the words THE ORGAN OF THE FUNDAMENTALIST CHURCH OF SAINTS.
“That’s their birdcage liner,” said Roscoe from the backseat. “Puts even the most alert parakeet to sleep.”
“Let’s go, fellas,” I said.
The three of us got out of the car and formed a semicircle with officers from the other vehicles. I advised them to enter the house if we weren’t out in five minutes. Roscoe and I trotted up concrete porch steps. The screen door was closed but the front door open. I pressed the doorbell button and a buzzer went off inside. I waited half a minute. Nothing. A wind chime rang softly in the breeze. I pressed the button and waited once more. Nothing again. I opened the screen door and, holding the warrant in my left hand and taking out my .38 with my right, moved into the front entrance hall.
Roscoe eased the door closed quietly and followed me. A forlorn symphony played somewhere in the distance. We went from room to room. All the blinds were drawn. It was dark in each place we checked. The furnishings came with that fresh smell of something recently carted out of a Sears and Roebuck freight. I opened a hallway door and the music suddenly got louder. Roscoe looked at me with a nod, as if acknowledging this was the place to go.
The door opened up to a set of stairs descending to the basement. I started down, taking each step slowly, and the wood moaned under my heels. Roscoe kept pace behind. Halfway down I caught my first glimpse of a small army of women, all dressed in the same type of heavy homespun, working away at newspaper production. The long basement room housed what appeared to be a professional linotype machine used for making newspapers and other printed items. Beyond it, like the great Sphinx of Egypt, sat a printing press, dark and metallic and full of intricate parts, with rolls of newsprint nearby. The symphony had grown louder, now rising to a string instrument crescendo, and I realized it was being played on a phonograph. Seven, no, eight women I counted, probably ranging in age from twenty to sixty. They stole looks at the two of us, never stopping what they were doing.
A man sat on a swivel chair at the linotype machine’s keyboard with his back to the basement stairs so that I couldn’t see his face. His fingers danced on the keys until my final footstep sounded a loud creak on the aging wood below my feet. He froze, raised his head slightly, and turned just enough to give me a fleeting peek at his profile before shifting back again. He reached to his right, to the phonograph sitting on a small table near his workstation, lifted the needle off the record, and closed the machine’s cover.
“He was only thirty-one when he died.”
I still couldn’t see his face.
“Who?” I asked.
“Schubert. That’s his Symphony number eight in B minor. The Unfinished Symphony.”
“Are you Alma Covington?”
“Yes.”
I held my badge shoulder level, but he kept his back to me. Roscoe fished out his badge, too, and displayed it. “Detective Arthur Oveson, Salt Lake City Police Department. This is Detective Lund, my partner. You’re under arrest.”
“May I finish putting the finishing touches on the next issue? It won’t be long.”
“He said you’re under arrest,” echoed Roscoe.
He spun toward us in his swivel chair. His bifocals rested on the end of his nose, too large for his narrow face. “What is the origin of that name?”
The question took me aback. “Which one? Oveson?”
“Yes. I’m curious to know.”
“How come?”
“Please humor me.” He leaned far forward in his chair, smiled slyly, and whispered, “I’m a genealogy fiend.”
Roscoe and I stole glances at each other. I put away my wallet and shrugged. “I suppose if you traced it far enough back, you’d end up in Denmark.”
“Ah, a sturdy people, the Danes,” he said. “That’s where I went on my mission as a lad. Copenhagen. It’s an extraordinary city, full of breathtaking architecture and gardens. Have you been?”
“No.”
“You must go! The Rosenborg Castle Gardens is one place you are required to visit before you die! Lush. Full of exotic plants. Rich in history.”
“I hate to cut off the geography lesson,” said Roscoe. “But you’re still under arrest.”
“So I am! Well then, let’s not delay this process another second.”
He rose to his feet and came over to us with a confident stride, holding his hands out as if offering them to be cuffed. Roscoe maneuvered around me, brought Covington’s arms behind him, and snapped the handcuffs on. The women gathered to bid a silent farewell to Covington, whose oddball grin never went away. He didn’t seem the least shaken up by what was happening, which ran contrary to every other arrest I’d made since joining the SLCPD. I started to wonder about his sanity, whether he possessed any.
“Aren’t you curious about why you’re being arrested?” Roscoe asked, stepping to Covington’s side.
Covington eyed me intently, ignoring Roscoe’s question. “You’re not related to Gustav Oveson, are you?”
I instantly recognized the name: my paternal great-grandfather. He crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century with other Danish converts to Mormonism. I nodded. “I am, as a matter of fact. Why do you ask?”
“I see. You know something? I think we’re related.”
I looked at Roscoe and tilted my head toward the basement steps. He escorted Alma Covington to the main floor and out the front door. I had no desire to find out whether I was really related to him.
* * *
“Lead the way, boss,” said Roscoe, unable to wipe that smirk off his face. “You do the talking.”
We surveyed the scene at our third and final stop of the day, a two-story redbrick house in an isolated part of town northwest of the state capitol. By now, the men in our police convoy knew the routine, and they milled about on the hot sidewalk while I conducted my business. Up here were squat, sullen little dwellings with closed blinds, tucked away under canopies of catalpa, ash, and maple trees. About half the driveways contained a jalopy. Most of these houses dated back to the last century, constructed at the bottom of a hill, baked daily by the hot sun. The area attracted plural marriage zealots who stubbornly maintained the practice long after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints forbade it in 1890. Except for a handful of elderly men who had married multiple wives in their youth and then stopped after the 1890 ban, the Church aggressively excommunicated practicing polygamists. Outcasts preferred neighborhoods like this—cut off enough that the police rarely visited, yet sufficiently close to still have access to the city.
Roscoe shadowed me up front steps and I knocked on the screen door. Ten seconds passed. I turned around and looked over Roscoe’s shoulder at an ancient black delivery truck with the words ROCKY MOUNTAIN COAL COMPANY on its sideboards as it rattled south on 200 East. I turned to knock again when the inner door opened and a lanky man around fifty years old appeared on the other side of the screen.
Eldon Black.
He had me beat in the height department by a few inches. A layer of thinning brown hair topped an oblong head, a pale-skinned noggin barely wide enough to showcase his bug eyes, turned-up nose, and protruding mouth. I don’t know as I’d call him homely—that’s a crummy thing to call someone—but Clark Gable had nothing to fear. Maybe he’d get handsomer with age.
“May I help you?”
I held my badge face level. “Detective Art Oveson, Salt Lake—”
“You were in the papers. You captured the Running Board Bandit.”
“Yes, I did.”
“That was fine work,” he said. He craned his neck to see over my shoulder, and he swallowed hard when he saw Roscoe and, beyond him, the uniformed officers down by the street. “What are you doing here?”
“Eldon Black?” I asked.
No reply. No nod or any other movement. He hovered ghostlike on the other side of that thick screen, not even blinking.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“The prophet is dead.”
“How did you find out about his death?”
“Word travels fast. I suspect you wish to question my father? He’s not here, I’m afraid.”
“Where is he?”
“At his compound in northern Arizona.”
“Is he planning on coming here?” I asked.
“He’s frail. He’s in no condition to travel.”
“I see,” I said with a nod. “Is it safe to say that you function as his representative, then?”
“Yes.”
“You’re under arrest,” I said, fishing out my warrant.
He didn’t bother examining the warrant. Instead, he pressed the screen door outward, a spring moaned, and he pulled the thick, arched wooden door shut behind him. He locked the door and pocketed the key, then faced me with his hands ex
tended outward, side by side, dangling at the wrists. “Cuff me.”
Eight
The roundup of polygamist apostles from the Fundamentalist Church of Saints the day after the murder of their prophet, LeGrand Johnston, went textbook smoothly. The eleven men we arrested, all older—most in their forties, fifties, sixties—and dressed in dark suits, each requested to see their attorney, Granville Sondrup, but otherwise said nothing. Meanwhile, polygamist wives—about thirty strong—lined up at the front desk clerk, asking when their husbands would be released. Impossible to ignore in their prairie attire, these women seemed to be frozen in time at around 1851. This bizarre gathering, naturally, attracted the press hounds, who came out in full force with photographers and began snapping pictures. One duo, reporter Abner Clayton and his youthful shutterbug sidekick, Tommy Phelps, found their way to the basement jail cells and managed to line up a photograph of all the polygamist apostles we’d just arrested, right before they were taken to their jail cells.
After the flash went off, a uniformed officer broke it up. “All right, c’mon, the show’s over. Right this way to your temporary accommodations, gentlemen!”
The subdued men filed into their cells and heavy steel doors squealed and clanged shut, with the loud striking of metal against metal as they locked. Behind bars, the men stayed eerily silent, staring out at me with rage in their eyes. I took in the scene, shook my head in disgust, and headed to the marble stairs leading up to the detective bureau. Clayton, the reporter, a lean, pockmarked fellow in a brown hat and greenish jacket, went up the steps with me to the first floor, and up the next flight.
“Detective Oveson, I loved you on the radio!”
“Thank you, Ab,” I said. “That’s awfully kind.”
“Don’t mention it. By the way, how do you respond to the accusation that the Salt Lake City police are stifling these people’s religious freedom with these arrests?” asked Abner.
“Who’s making that accusation?” I asked.
“Shoot, I don’t know,” said Abner. “Me, I guess.”