A Killing in Zion

by Andrew Hunt

  “You’re not as naive as I thought,” said Eldon, with a bloody grin. He caressed his father’s football-like head. “Nelpha didn’t hold up her end of the bargain. I knew that day you came to arrest me, Oveson. She betrayed me.”

  “That’s because she didn’t shoot Johnston,” I said. “Someone else did it.”

  I stared meaningfully at Jared. Our eyes met. He confirmed with a single, solemn nod. A crackling gasp came from Eldon. When I looked down at him, I noticed he seemed awfully still. I moved the flashlight near his face. No need to check for a pulse. He was gone.

  Jared said, “Is he…”

  “Yeah.”

  After a long silence, Jared asked, “How did you know it was me?”

  I reached into my pocket and fished out that rain-drenched speeding ticket I had found in the glove box of the Model T truck parked in Claudia’s garage. I handed it to him, along with the flashlight. “I found this inside the Model T truck parked in Claudia’s garage.” Says you were going sixty-eight in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone,” I said. “You were driving a delivery truck owned by Columbia Transport out of Flagstaff. When the Utah Highway Patrol officer who wrote up that ticket saw that you were the one driving, he voided it, tore it out, and gave it to you.”

  “Maybe he just didn’t want to ticket an out-of-state truck,” said Jared.

  “No, that’s not it,” I said. “You were in the motorcycle bureau long enough to know two things. One, there’s a ticket-collection agreement in place between Utah and Arizona. Two, when you rode a police Harley, you befriended a lot of highway patrolmen, including the one who voided that ticket. I’m sure if he were subpoenaed, he’d confirm what I’m saying.”

  He gave me back the ticket. “That’s all you’ve got? A speeding ticket?”

  “Nope. A few other things gave you away. When you told me you sneaked into the crime scene the day after the murder, I knew you were lying. Two uniformed officers were assigned to guard the church full-time until the Homicide dicks wrapped up their investigation, and I’m sure they’d confirm my suspicions that you never showed up there on July the third. Oh, and the gun in the hedges? Nice touch, Jared. No homicide investigator in his right mind would ever assume that a detective bureau man would do something so sloppy. It worked. You threw off the bloodhounds. You were never even on Wit’s long list. Too bad you didn’t wipe the gun well enough before you tossed it. Some of Nelpha’s prints are still on it. I’m sure you didn’t intend for her to be a suspect.”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t. After I shot Uncle Grand and Volney Mason, I turned around and she was gone. I had no idea where she went. I got panicky. I knew there was a chance you’d be watching the premises. So I fled, without looking for her. Had Claudia or Carl gone there with her that night, they might’ve done the same thing as me, but they wouldn’t have been as mindful as I was about the need to clear out fast. I guess I threw a real scare into Nelpha, huh?”

  “She was pretty shaken,” I said. “One other thing gave you away.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yesterday, in your apartment, when I was questioning you, you knew too much,” I said. “Only two of my questions failed to get a conclusive answer out of you. The first was when I asked if Rulon was in on the heist, and of course you had no way of knowing. So you passed that one. The other was my question about who might’ve pulled the trigger on Johnston and Mason. You didn’t even offer a theory. And after you answered all of the other questions so smoothly, I knew you were protecting either the Jeppsons or yourself.”

  Jared let out a shaky sigh.

  “Everything you say is right,” he said. “When we get back to Salt Lake City, I’ll voluntarily surrender. I’ll sign a confession.”

  I shook my head. “There won’t be any confessions.”

  Even in the darkness, I could see that Jared looked confused. “Why?”

  “You did what you did for the noblest reason of all,” I said. “To protect a frightened girl who was so tired of being abused that she was willing to consider murdering someone else to get out of it. That she couldn’t bring herself to do it, but you could, doesn’t make you a criminal. It makes you a man with a good heart who had no choice but to do something terrible.”

  He closed his eyes and I heard a forlorn sob in the darkness. I reached up and gently patted his shoulder.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  Thirty-six

  Three weeks later, our third child, a daughter, was born.

  She came into the world on the first day of August. She had a thin layer of golden brown hair. She weighed eight pounds, two ounces. And she was a kicker.

  Good thing the LDS Hospital had such a big waiting room. Between Clara’s sizable family and the massive Oveson clan, it looked like half of the state of Utah had invaded the place. Old and young, men and women, boys and girls had squeezed inside the area, packed in like sardines.

  I sat on a hard wooden chair, sandwiched between Roscoe and Myron. Without changing his expression one iota, Myron handed me a little square box wrapped in silvery paper, topped with two bows, one pink, one blue.

  “Open it.”

  I tore off the paper and lifted the lid. Inside, I found two pairs of knitted baby booties. Like the bows on the package, one pair was a deep pink and the other a shade of robin’s egg blue. I examined them with delight, holding them up for my various relations to see.

  “Thank you, Myron,” I said. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “Hannah made them. Obviously, she wasn’t sure if you were having a boy or a girl, so she erred on the side of caution.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure to send her a thank-you card,” I said. “In the meantime, maybe you could let her know how happy we were to get these. They’re perfect.”

  Myron nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  When the doctor burst out of the swinging doors, he froze in shock at the sight of the huge crowd. “Is the father here?” he called out.

  “Look alive,” said Roscoe, patting me on the back. “Time to meet the newest Oveson.”

  “Let him through, let him through!” hollered my brother John, herding the family apart to clear a pathway to the double doors.

  The doctor led me to the hospital room at the end of the hall.

  “Emily Margaret Oveson,” said Clara, “I’d like to introduce you to your father.”

  I bowed low and Clara placed the baby into my arms. The blanket shadowed her sleeping round face, soft and pink, with puffy eyelids and little red lips that moved every so often. The nurse slid a chair near the bed and gestured for me to take a seat. I sat down, cradling my new daughter in my arms, feeling her gentle movements. I lost track of how long I sat there, holding her, rocking slowly, whispering to her about how proud I was to be her father.

  I returned the baby to Clara. She told the doctor she wanted to take the baby out for all of our relatives to see. He hesitated, but finally agreed, and a nurse assisted Clara into a wheelchair. I pushed her while she held the baby in her arms. We went through the double doors into the sea of people out in the waiting room. Clara allowed only a select few people to hold the baby. “I don’t want her catching anything from anybody,” she said.

  By the late afternoon, the crowd had cleared. Only Roscoe remained in a quiet corner of the waiting room, thumbing through a magazine. I motioned for him to come over. He tossed his magazine on the stack, got up, and ambled over.

  “The proud papa,” he said. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

  Clara looked up at me with a smile that told me all I need to know. I delicately lifted Emily with both hands out of her arms and walked over to Roscoe.

  “Here,” I said. I leaned toward him with Emily.

  He shook his head and flashed his palms. “No. I’d better not.”

  “No, seriously. Take her.”

  “I’m no good at this.…”

  “C’mon,” I said. “Here, hold out your arms.…”
/>   “Shoot, Art. I don’t know.…”

  “You can do it.”

  Roscoe raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “I insist. C’mon. You just have to support her head.”

  “Yeah, okay. Let me see.…”

  He moved in with his arms spread like a forklift.

  “Hold them closer together,” I suggested. “Like a little cradle.”

  I passed the baby into Roscoe’s big arms. He stood as stiff as a barbershop pole. He kept his hand behind her head at all times. He started to look panicky, like he was about to drop her. He eyed me to make sure I wasn’t leaving. “She’s a cute kid.”

  “I thought you’d like her,” I said.

  “What’re you planning on calling her?”

  “Emily,” I said. “Emily, this is your uncle Roscoe.”

  “Hey, kid, you’re cute as a button, but I’m gonna give you back to your old man before I die of heart failure.”

  Roscoe returned Emily to me and I gently handed her back to Clara. Straightening, I elbowed Roscoe and winked. “I think you’re a natural at this.”

  “As long as we keep it to uncle,” he said, “everything will be fine.”

  “You have one of your own,” I said. “Rose.”

  His smile faded as he dipped his head and sighed. “Yep.”

  “It’s not too late,” I said. “A girl always needs her father.”

  He raised his head and his mouth formed a rueful grin, but it could not hide the pain I’m sure he felt inside.

  * * *

  The rest of the summer lives on as a series of fragments in my mind. We welcomed our newborn daughter to her home, but the place felt a little emptier without Nelpha. Not long after the incident at Rulon Black’s compound, I persuaded Wit Dunaway to drop his investigation of Nelpha. I told him that Claudia Jeppson had confessed to pulling the trigger that night. Despite how much I hated lying, I knew what I was doing was for the best. Wit had no great passion to charge Nelpha with the crime. He admitted that she’d left only partial fingerprints on the gun. With no eyewitnesses, and a public that would be overwhelmingly sympathetic to Nelpha if she were ever put on trial, Wit declared the case closed. When the story broke, the press portrayed Claudia Jeppson as a heroine, a former polygamist wife who came to the defense of a helpless child bride, to prevent Nelpha from being sent back to a fate worse than death.

  I thought of Nelpha often, but I faced my own challenges in the summer and fall. After Emily’s birth, I spent endless weeks staying up late with her, thanks to a bout of colic and a tendency toward wakefulness on her part that made her every bit as much of a night owl as her father. I’d take her out for moonlit auto rides around the Avenues, and on certain nights, I’d park high on the hill and watch the glow from a distant wildfire.

  By early August, overworked volunteer brigades had managed to contain most of the blazes, with only one or two of the most tenacious infernos still burning as of Labor Day. A few well-timed rainstorms helped. The fires of ’34 had been catastrophic, scorching millions of acres across the western states. Fourteen men, ranging in age from nineteen to fifty-four, perished in the flames that summer. A memorial was later erected in Big Cottonwood Canyon to the men who died in the Fire Season of 1934. It is still there, shaded by aspen trees.

  * * *

  After the Anti-Polygamy Squad folded, Roscoe quit the police force to launch his own detective agency, Beehive Discreet Investigations. He ran it out of a little office in the Rio Grande Railroad Depot on the west side of town. To supplement his income, he worked as a railroad dick, patrolling the yard for intruders and tossing hoboes off boxcars. I put on a cheery face and wished Roscoe well, but inside I was sad to see my old friend go. Public Safety seemed like a less lively place without him.

  I wound up back on the Morals Squad, under the command of laconic, sleepy-eyed Lieutenant Harman Grundvig. He launched a highly publicized crusade to drive every slot machine—or “one-armed bandit,” as he called them—out of Salt Lake City. With the press in tow, we raided downtown clubs and isolated roadhouses alike, occasionally smashing down doors with axes for a little added drama.

  The shutterbugs snapped pictures as we loaded the gambling devices onto dollies and carted them out to waiting police vans. I hammed it up for show, whipping out my pistol for the cameras, wearing my hat low, playing up my Running Board Bandit credentials. But the reality was, I missed my old squad. I did not miss commanding it, or even necessarily what we did. No. It was the people I missed. Roscoe. Myron. Jared.

  Myron had returned to the records division in the basement. We stayed in touch through our monthly lunches. During one particularly memorable noontime meal at the Chit Chat Luncheonette, he opened up about his own personal history, discussing his father, the retired former rabbi at the B’nai Israel Temple, and his mother, who escaped the pogroms in Russia. He showed me a picture of his wife, Hannah, and recounted what it was like to grow up Jewish in Salt Lake City. “It was pretty boring, when you get right down to it,” he said. “But after everything my people have been through, I’ll take boring any old day.”

  Jared, like Roscoe, resigned from the police department in the summer. He founded a new charity called Hospitality House to aid refugees of all ages fleeing polygamy. The press loved it, and his smiling mug appeared on A1 of all the local dailies. He refused to take a dime of the heist money, still packed away in a trunk down at Rulon Black’s compound. Instead, he used the press as a bully pulpit to raise funds for his new undertaking. His success exceeded my highest expectations. Playing on the antagonism that most mainstream Mormons felt toward polygamy, he managed to raise enough money to renovate the house on B Street and purchase a second home next door, to make space for new arrivals. Donations poured in from concerned citizens, in Utah and across the country. Even in hard times, people sent what they could, and every little bit made a difference.

  * * *

  One day in fall, chilly and overcast, I was raking leaves in the front yard with the help of Hyrum and Sarah Jane. A car pulled up to the curb and who should get out of the passenger side but Nelpha. She looked beautiful with her hair freshly styled and a brown dress with white lace. I stuck my head in the house and called Clara, and she came outside with the baby in warm clothes and a coat. Jared had given her a ride that day, and he got out of the car to join the reunion. Hugs were exchanged all around, and we Ovesons took a break from raking to reminisce about Nelpha’s time with us. Finally, she passed me a gift box and asked me to open it. I ripped the wrapping off, lifted the lid on the box, and looked down at a familiar needlepoint pillow that I once saw inside of the soiled little pillowcase that held all of her belongings. The big, block serif words on it said GOD BLESS OUR HOME.

  “Thank you,” I said, getting choked up. “We will cherish it.”

  I held out my hand to shake hers, but she did something that caught me off guard. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tightly. I leaned forward and kissed her on top of the head.

  “We’ll always be here,” I said.

  She pulled back and nodded, as if I was telling her something she already knew.

  Jared walked up to me and shook my hand.

  “You busy on Thanksgiving, boss?” he asked. “Because I got two dozen kids just itching to cook a dinner with all the fixins for you all.”

  I looked at Clara and she smiled and nodded her approval.

  “We’d love to come,” I told Jared.

  “Fabulous! Why don’t we say, oh, about five? I’ve invited Myron and Hannah, and Roscoe, too. It’ll be like having the old squad back.”

  I grinned warmly. “Thanks, Jared.”

  Nelpha climbed in the car and closed the door and Jared circled to the other side. Before he opened the door, I called out to him. “Hey, Jared. You aren’t my subordinate anymore. No need to call me boss.”

  He chuckled and winked. “I guess not. But, at this point, anything else just seems wrong.”

  With that,
he got in the car and drove away.

  * * *

  The violence that plagued that dark summer of 1934 soon faded from the public’s memory.

  The homicides of Carl Jeppson and Orville Babcock were eventually declared unsolved in the respective jurisdictions where they occurred, and subsequently filed away. Down in Kingman, Arizona, Sheriff Burke Colborne accepted my fabricated version of events: that a bitter rivalry had developed between Rulon Black and his son Eldon, leading to a bloody confrontation between rival factions at the Black compound. Ironically, I wasn’t that far off.

  The lackluster response of these investigators reflected a deeper, troubling reality of the times: Nobody wanted to touch the polygamists. I went to DAs, state attorneys, and judges, lugging around with me a box of evidence that shed light on the polygamists’ criminal business enterprises. Among the documents in my possession was a notarized statement from Carl Jeppson that one of his wives gave me after I returned from my brush with death down at that deep chasm. It detailed a variety of crooked practices, including the infamous Homestead land scheme. The district attorney in Salt Lake City apologized and informed me that none of it fell within his domain. An attorney with the state of Utah declared that he did not have the time, resources, or inclination to pursue the case. Federal judges in Arizona and Utah counseled me to drop the whole thing.

  “You seem like a decent fellow,” said the judge in Phoenix. “Mind if I give you some unsolicited advice, off the record and free of charge?”

  “Please,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

  “Go home to your family and forget about all of this.” He shrugged. “So what if some guy marries a bunch of ladies? A quarter of my state is outta work, Oveson. Men that used to own respectable businesses are now out riding the rails, looking for work. Forgive my foul mouth—I know you’re a Mormon and all—but they don’t give a shit about polygamists and, frankly, neither do I. Let those fools marry as many women as they want. If they break the law, the justice system will have at ’em. Take your box, go back to Salt Lake City, and count your blessings that you’ve still got a job.”