A Killing in Zion

by Andrew Hunt

  He moved in a flash, and his haymaker to my chin made me see stars. Now I was the one on the ground, my face numb with shock. He took out his revolver and aimed at me and I swear I saw his trigger finger wiggle, but the sound of a clicking gun hammer stopped him. Roscoe came over with his .38 pressed at Kunz’s head, and he was as cool as a mountain stream in November. One more revolver hammer got pulled back, and the other Kunz now had his gun pointed at Roscoe in a grim deadlock.

  “Looks like we’re all fucked,” said Roscoe. “Unless, of course, cool heads prevail. I say we all lower our pieces, and my friend and I will clear on outta here.”

  All three men lowered their guns at the same time. I managed to stand up on my feet and I dusted myself off. I shook my sore hand, and the weight of the Kunz brothers’ fury-filled stares proved almost more than I could bear. Steed was still strangely emotionless, as if not entirely present, like his wife’s death meant nothing to him. We hiked back up to the road, with Roscoe coming up behind me, keeping a vigilant eye on the marshal and his deputies below. Back in the car, Roscoe reached over and gently patted my knee.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  * * *

  After stopping to fill my tank in St. George I motored across a succession of dry valleys, with the late afternoon turning to evening, and the shadows of hills growing taller by the minute. For part of the drive, Roscoe slept with his hat pulled down over his face and his head dipping so his chin touched his chest. Sometimes his snoring was louder than the car’s engine. Twilight brought a welcome drop in the temperature, and a cool breeze blew through the open window, ruffling my hair. I regarded it as a gift after enduring the heat of Dixie City. Somewhere in central Utah, Roscoe sat up straight, tilted his hat back, and looked out at the scenery—what there was of it—shaded by a darkening sky still splashed with hues of orange, purple, and indigo. He wiped drool off his mouth with his sleeve and he let out a sigh.

  “You’ve got a hell of a right hook,” said Roscoe. “Remind me not to ever get on your bad side.”

  That made me laugh. “I’m tougher than I thought.”

  “That you are,” he said. He was quiet in a reflective way. “What you did back there was crazy as hell. But it took guts. You did what you had to do. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thanks.” Driving at a decent clip, hands gripping the wheel, I still felt sick to my stomach at the thought of what we’d been through. “If it weren’t for me, she’d still be alive. I should’ve listened to Buddy.”

  “That’s horseshit,” he said, packing a wad of Red Man into his mouth. “Where’d you come up with that damn fool idea?”

  “That wasn’t an accident,” I said. “The Kunz brothers saw her talking to us last night. I’m sure of it.”

  “It ain’t your fault that they’re a couple of cold-blooded killers,” said Roscoe. “Them two got ice water running through their veins. Their old man was a crackpot polygamist, living way out in the middle of nowhere. He used to beat the hell out of his boys while reading scripture to ’em. No wonder they murdered a Navajo kid named Jimmy Nakai when they were only fourteen. Of course, the sheriff of San Juan County was too lily-livered to bust ’em for—”

  “Hold on a second, is all that true?” I asked, struggling to keep my eyes on the road and not on Roscoe.

  “Yeah. Sure it is.”

  “How do you know so much about the Kunz brothers?”

  “That walk I went for in the night,” he said. “I went and jimmied the lock at the marshal’s office and looked through his files.”

  The news astonished me. “You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “How could you?”

  “It was easy. That’s a flimsy lock Steed’s got on the back door.…”

  “No, I mean that’s a huge risk you took,” I said.

  “After throttling Kunz at that crash scene earlier, I’d say you don’t have a leg to stand on lecturing me about risk taking.”

  “All right, you got me,” I said. “So what happened?”

  “I was in there about an hour and a half. I’ve got a feeling I only saw the tip of the iceberg. That prick Steed is either running a blackmail racket out of his office or somebody’s using him to dig up information on others. He’s got files on nearly every single one of the big-shot patriarchs, and a whole lot of other folks in that town.”

  “What’s in these files?”

  “Dirt,” said Roscoe. “Surveillance photos, reports on the apostles’ movements, private letters that I’m guessing were stolen. A lot of what’s in those dossiers confirms our worst suspicions—you know, all of the accusations about underage marriages, crooked land deals, and those poor boys who got kicked out, left to fend for themselves. Hell, half of these sorry old prunes are diddling each other’s wives, as if they’re not getting laid enough by their own small armies of señoritas at home. The only man Steed didn’t have a file on was Rulon Black. It makes me wonder if Steed is Rulon’s goon.”

  “When were you going to tell me all of this?” I asked.

  He sideways-glanced at me. “I’m telling you now.”

  “Did he keep a file on LeGrand Johnston?”

  “Yeah, but nothing on who might’ve killed him,” he said. “Steed is thorough. I’ll give him that much. From what I saw, he keeps copies of everything, including carbons of his own letters.”

  I nodded. “Did you happen to run into any information on the four missing boys?”

  “Can’t say I did,” said Roscoe. “I did find one gem. Steed kept a file on Nelpha.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. I figured you’d wanna see it, since she’s staying with you. So I took the liberty of lifting it.”

  “Are you serious? You stole the file?”

  He looked over at me. “You’ll thank me.”

  * * *

  I pulled up to Roscoe’s apartment around ten o’clock at night. We said our good-byes, and he got out of the car, closed the door, and started to walk away. “Hey, Roscoe,” I called out. He stopped about halfway to the door, turned around, and came back to my idling Oldsmobile, lifting his foot onto the running board and resting his elbow on the car door, where the window was rolled all the way down.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t know how to thank you for all your help. Sometimes I think if it weren’t for you…”

  “Art?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t mention it.” He winked and patted the car door twice. “See you Monday.”

  Minutes later, I steered into the driveway of my house in the high Avenues, killed the engine, and collected my suitcase and the file on Nelpha Black. The lights were on in the house, so I checked my appearance in the car’s exterior rearview mirror and concluded that I looked terrible and it would take too much work to make me halfway presentable. I drew a deep breath and headed up the walkway. Opening the front door triggered a stir in the house, with Sarah Jane, Hyrum, and Clara coming to welcome me. The kids were in their pajamas, and everybody greeted me with hugs and overlapping greetings.

  “She’s back, Dad!” said Sarah Jane. “She’s here!”

  “Who?”

  “The girl! She came back!”

  I reared my head in surprise. “Nelpha’s back?”

  Now Clara looked confused. “Nelpha? Is that her name?”

  “Yeah, Nelpha Black,” I said. “It’s a long story. Where is she?”

  “C’mere, Dad!” said Hyrum. “We’ll show you.”

  My children each took an arm and towed me down the hallway, toward Sarah Jane’s room. Sarah Jane reached for the knob and opened the door as quietly as possible, and a soft light from the hallway bathed Nelpha as she slept soundly on Sarah Jane’s bed. A blanket and sheet covered most of her, although her hair spilled out on the pillow. On the floor, near the foot of the bed, sat her soiled pillowcase.

  Where did she go? I wondered.

  I wanted to examine the contents of Steed’s file on Nelpha, but my child
ren reminded me it was Saturday night—and in the middle of summer, no less—so it wasn’t too late for some family time. It didn’t take much coaxing for me to join them in the living room. The more time we spent together, laughing, playing games, listening to the radio, the less I thought about that file and the troubling death of Talena Steed.

  As Clara and I lay in bed, she told me about arriving home from the grocery store with the kids that morning to find Nelpha inside the house, coming up the basement stairs. Clara wondered how long Nelpha had been down there, but she was so happy to have her back, she chose not to dwell on it. I told Clara about the episode several days ago when I had found our mystery girl emerging from the basement. I wondered aloud if there was any connection. Clara shrugged it off, chalked it up to curiosity on the girl’s part. But I thought about it. A lot.

  Hours later, lying in the darkness of our bedroom, listening to Clara breathing in her sleep, I wondered: Where had Nelpha gone? It seemed unlikely she could have hidden in the basement that entire time. Did she actually leave the house? If so, was she with somebody? Why did she come back? I recalled something Roscoe had said before we left for Dixie City, a comment to the effect that I knew nothing about Nelpha. He was right. At that point, I hadn’t even known her name. I had no reason to trust her. She could have been capable of murder, for all I knew.

  I got up in the night and crept into the living room. I switched on a lamp and sat down at my desk with my new acquisition, the file on Nelpha Black from Steed’s office. DIXIE CITY POLICE REPORT, said a top sheet, with a snapshot of Nelpha Black stapled to it. I went straight to her stats:

  LAST NAME: BLACK

  FIRST NAME: NELPHA

  MIDDLE NAME: MARY

  DATE OF BIRTH: FEBRUARY 6, 1921

  PLACE OF BIRTH: RUBY CREEK, UTAH

  PARENTS: MR. AND MRS. ALMA COVINGTON

  It surprised me to read that Alma Covington, the quirky apostle in the Fundamentalist Church of Saints who edited the newspaper called Truth out of his basement on Third Avenue, was her father. He was one of the few arrestees earlier in the week who had made half an effort to be friendly to me. I remembered showing him the photograph of Nelpha during the interrogation at Public Safety and asking him if he knew her. “I’m afraid not,” he said. Was he the one she visited while she was gone? I wondered. I quickly ruled out that possibility when I remembered that he was in Dixie City for LeGrand Johnston’s funeral.

  I read on.

  STATUS: MARRIED, JUNE 15, 1933

  SPOUSE: BLACK, RULON T.

  CURRENT PLACE OF RESIDENCE: R. BLACK COMPOUND, NEAR DIXIE CITY

  The line about her marital status literally made me nauseous. Only thirteen years old, I thought. How could they? This was why I found these men so repulsive. In my eyes, marrying multiple women was a troubling offense; wedding little girls, however, was beyond the pale. That seemed to me to be completely unacceptable, with no room for compromise, and no shades of gray. I had to put my fury aside in order to concentrate on reading. My eyes dropped to the summary of her disappearance, right below her stats.

  COMPLAINANT: BLACK, RULON T.

  DETAIL OF EVENT: Rulon Black visited the station at 14:45 on Thursday, May 10, 1934, to report that his youngest wife, Nelpha, went missing two days previous, on May 8. The subject was last seen at Mr. Black’s compound by two of his wives and one of his daughters sometime around half past seven on the morning of May 8. Eyewitnesses reported that the subject was running in haste. Rulon Black’s daughter Braylea, the last person to see Nelpha Black, watched her enter a barn where there is a tunnel that lets out near Big Water Creek. Deputies D & D Kunz investigated the opening of the tunnel at the creek and found footprints in the sand, but no sign of the subject. Subject remains at large and is believed to be traveling in the direction of Salt Lake City, where she has kin. Rulon Black stresses that it is urgent that we find her, as he is protective of the girl and wishes to see her returned alive. Signed, FERRON W. STEED, Marshal, Dixie City, Arizona.

  I thumbed through the rest of the police file to see if I could get any sense of this girl or why she was here in Salt Lake City. I worked my way through pages of typed reports and anonymous tips, each contributing a new layer to an increasingly complicated portrait of Nelpha as a troubled girl. If you believed the folder’s contents, Nelpha at age seven beat up three bullies who tormented her for being a mute, at age nine stole a revolver belonging to her father and shot a bullet into somebody’s window, and at age eleven set a barn on fire that belonged to a polygamist patriarch and watched it burn to the ground. As I worked my way through the pages, I kept running into certain words repeatedly: “willful,” “spiteful,” “rebellious,” “defiant,” “disobedient.”

  I came across a photograph taken from a distance of Nelpha with Boyd Johnston. They were standing side by side on the banks of a creek, holding hands, smiling at each other. I puzzled over who might’ve taken the photograph and why. Was it one of Rulon’s goons? Marshal Steed or the Kunz brothers? I guessed it to be a surveillance photograph, though I didn’t know for certain. I checked the back for a date or some other handwritten hint that might help me understand it. Nothing.

  Flipping pages, I found a police incident document toward the bottom of the folder that caught my attention. It bore the date Monday, May 14, 1934. My eyes dropped to the body of the report: “Sheriff Steed has ruled out Missus Black’s involvement in the rash of thefts that commenced last month and have spread at an alarming rate to the compounds of virtually all of our beloved apostles. The incidents began in late April and have continued as recently as the date of suspect’s disappearance. Sheriff Steed interviewed Rulon Black at length this morning and Black stated in the strongest of terms that Nelpha played no part in the bold acts of larceny that have shaken our town.”

  I picked up my pencil and jotted the word “larceny” on my pad of paper. I drew an arrow, and on the other side of the point I wrote “Nelpha,” followed by a question mark. I wondered: What was stolen? Money? Precious heirlooms? Maybe the perpetrators took items that could easily be resold at a pawnshop, like phonographs or firearms or musical instruments. Or it could’ve been all of the above. If Nelpha was involved in the thefts, how could she single-handedly move the stolen goods to Salt Lake City? How was I going to get any answers to these questions when Nelpha couldn’t say a word?

  Twenty-two

  “It may surprise you to know that I have no intention of raising my voice today,” announced Buddy Hawkins, almost joyfully.

  Those words ended nearly five minutes of silence, the longest five minutes of my life. It was Monday morning, a little past nine. I’d spent the previous day—Sunday—in church and afterward, at dinner with my family, fearful that this moment might come. Sure enough, Roscoe and I occupied a pair of side-by-side chairs in Buddy’s office, the same place I had sat last Thursday when he told me not to go to Dixie City. Outside, a dry thunderstorm unleashed flashing lightning and coughed up thunder that shook the glass panes. Unfortunately, there was no rain to go with it, a common occurrence in Utah, but one that only exacerbated the dangerous forest fire epidemic across the state. Even without the precipitation, it seemed appropriate weather for the tongue thrashing we were about to receive.

  “You see, shouting doesn’t do any good,” he said, rolling his chair closer to his desk, where he propped up his elbows. “Remember our meeting on Thursday, Art?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say that I raised my voice at that meeting?”

  I made a long face and nodded slowly. “A few times.”

  “Do you recall what we discussed that day?”

  “I wanted to go to Dixie City.”

  “What did I tell you at that meeting?”

  “You told me I oughtn’t to—”

  “No, I never used the word ‘oughtn’t,’” he interrupted calmly. “I ordered you not to go Dixie City. Would you say that’s a fair characterization of my position last Thursday?”

  I
nodded. “Yeah.”

  “After our meeting, what did you do?” asked Buddy.

  “I went home and I…”

  “Jump ahead,” said Buddy. “To the next day. Friday. What did you do on Friday?”

  “I drove down to Dixie City.”

  “With or without Roscoe?” asked Buddy.

  “With,” I said.

  “Despite what?” asked Buddy.

  “Despite you advising me…”

  “Despite me ordering you…”

  “Despite you ordering me not to go.”

  Roscoe said, “Buddy, there’s something you should know—”

  Buddy gaped at Roscoe and cut him off: “Roscoe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There was a movie in the theaters about six or seven years ago called The Jazz Singer. Remember? Al Jolson. Blackface. ‘Mammy.’ Ring any bells?”

  “Sure,” said Roscoe. “Who didn’t see it? It was the first talkie ever made.”

  “Precisely. Before that, what were all other movies?”

  “Silent,” said Roscoe.

  “Right!” said Buddy. “Now, unless you want to be selling apples on a street corner to make ends meet after you leave here, you’d better be exactly like all of those movies made before The Jazz Singer.” He leaned over his desk and hissed, “Silent.”

  Buddy resumed his soft-spoken interrogation of me. “I don’t suppose you were planning to inform me of this excursion of yours?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. You must be wondering how I found out about it.”

  “The thought did cross my mind.”

  “This morning, Chief Cowley received a telephone call from Granville Sondrup, representing his client, Deputy Dorland Kunz of Dixie City. Sondrup informed the chief that you two gentlemen arrived in Dixie City on the weekend of LeGrand Johnston’s funeral, and you committed a number of grievous offenses, including disrupting his funeral—”

  I protested: “We didn’t disrupt—”

  “Uh, uh, uh. Let me finish, Art.”

  “Yes, sir.”