The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “I guess.”

  Miller took a napkin from the caddy and wiped his face. It was 36 degrees outside and he was sweating. “A person dies on Yeach, animals find them pretty quick,” he said. “Way the bodies looked, he thinks maybe they were moved. Could be someone had them in a freezer or something then hauled them up there now.”

  “That what you think?”

  “Me? I don’t know,” Miller said. In the years I’d worked with him, I’d never heard him sound unequivocal. “A local probably wouldn’t take the chance. But someone from out of town? Hell. I don’t know. But the assistant DA, he thinks this is something the Brawton police, maybe the homicide unit they got out there, should get involved with, or at least maybe a more . . .” Miller trailed off when Lolly dropped his pie off. “Hell,” he said again. It was the only curse word I’d ever heard him utter. And every time he said it, it seemed like an actual declaration. That he was in hell. “You know what I’m trying to say here, right? Talk to the family, let them know it’s an option.”

  What he was trying to say was that there was some glamour to this case: A wealthy young family found murdered in the ski hamlet downstate. Five hundred thousand dollars sitting in an evidence room gathering dust. And glamour means an assistant DA upstate becomes DA, or mayor, or worse—a congressman.

  I also think Miller was trying to say that I didn’t have a chance in hell of finding the killer and that maybe I should let the blame fall on somebody upstairs.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”

  Miller ate his slice of pie, never once asking to see the autopsy file wedged between us. Eventually, Lolly went over to the six-foot artificial Christmas tree she kept by the front door and unplugged it, clicked off the battery-powered menorah over by the cash register, started to sweep up the strands of silver and gold tinsel that had fallen onto the floor.

  “All right then,” Miller said, standing to leave, his plate cleaned.

  “You know,” I said, “there’s nutmeg in apple pie, too.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said, zipping up his down jacket, “I figured that out.”

  “Don’t you want to know how they died, Miller?”

  Miller stuffed his hands into his pockets and sort of bowed, biting his bottom lip until it looked painful, and then shook his head. “This is what I know about these things,” he said. “There ain’t a cause or an effect once they’ve started to rot and such. They’re dead and they’re not coming back. If they were meant to still be alive, if God wanted them here right now, then God dammit, they’d be here. Time’s up, that’s all.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, suddenly angry with Miller, angry with the DA who wanted a big-city detective to run this case, angry with my wife Margaret for dying three years ago and leaving me alone, angry for those dead boys . . . and haunted by all the bodies I’d seen, all the lives I couldn’t save, all the trouble I’d been party to. How many men had I killed in my life? How many people had I hurt? All in the name of some law, words on a page that could be erased and replaced by some president or king or sheriff, whoever had the power to do the work, in the moment it needed to be done. Too often, that was me. And for what? “There is cause and effect, Miller. People don’t just punch in and punch out. Kids died up there, Miller. Kids. You can’t apply your mumbo jumbo to them. No one deserves that. This isn’t about rotting bodies and old bones. You can’t just toss a blanket over every body you see and pretend that they aren’t someone. Do you know that, Miller? Do you know?”

  Miller frowned at me. “Acute hemorrhaging of the lungs, an occlusion of the blood vessels around the eyes and face, suggesting suffocation. General failure of the major organs due to severe blood loss and the ensuing shock,” Miller said. The words tumbled out of his mouth like he was reading from a textbook. “Wounds consistent with a number of drug-related murders in a hundred different towns that aren’t Granite City. I’m sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “I really am.” He put out his hand, but I didn’t take it, so he shrugged, put it back in his pocket, and started toward the door. “Have a Merry Christmas, Morris. Take the day off. It would do you some good.”

  I watched Miller climb into his car—a beat-up El Camino that had a bright-green wreath on its front grill—and drive off. I knew that I didn’t want to end up like Miller Descent: a hard man unable to shake the horrors from his mind. I also knew that I was halfway there and closing the gap. So, with an envelope filled with the pictures of a dissected family in my hand, I left Lolly’s Diner and headed home, where I knew what I had to do, and where I knew I would not sleep.

  IT WAS COLD and overcast the next morning, Yeach Mountain lost behind a thicket of low, gray clouds. A light mist of rain fell as I drove through downtown Granite City toward the station. The streets, slick with moisture, refracted the glow from the strings of golden bulbs that were hung on the light posts each year by the Soroptimists and 4-H. I saw my dead wife Margaret duck into the yarn store on Porter, saw her coming from Biddle’s Flowers with a bundle of poinsettias, watched her make a call from the phone booth out front of the library, let her cross in front of me on Ninth Street, a ream of wrapping paper tucked under her arm. You live in a town long enough, the past, the present, it all occupies the same space.

  But when I walked into the station, all I saw were Mr. and Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Pellet sitting in the lobby. And I thought, seeing Mr. Klein in his black slacks and yellow V-neck sweater, everything about him out of place in my station, that maybe my time in Granite City was coming to a close, that I couldn’t bear to see despair in people’s faces anymore. That, most of all, I couldn’t keep on thinking about the daily rituals that still call to people even in their times of need: the soft pleat ironed down Mrs. Klein’s pant leg, the way Mrs. Pellet had put on a nice dress and gold earrings.

  “Been waiting long?” I asked.

  “No,” Mr. Klein said. His voice was low and I decided that he probably wasn’t long for this place either. “Didn’t get much in the way of rest last night.”

  “I’ve got the autopsies for your son’s family,” I said. “You can read ’em if you want to.”

  Mrs. Klein let out a short sob and squeezed her husband’s arm. Mr. Klein kissed her on the forehead and patted her hand. “Did he suffer, Sheriff?” Mrs. Klein asked.

  “No,” I said. “Looks like hypothermia.”

  “What about my Missy?” Mrs. Pellet asked. “And the kids; what about the kids?”

  “The same,” I said. “Best guess is they went hiking and the storm hit. Probably thought they could just wait it out. Which is why we found them together. Or they simply got lost. But lost together. I do believe there is some grace in that.” A look of relief passed over their faces, and though I believe they each knew that their children and grandchildren had died terribly, that in fact they’d been butchered, I had helped them in some way. Had eased something in them for at least a moment.

  Lyle walked out and tapped me on the shoulder. “Dr. DiGiangreco called for you,” he said. “Needs you to call her right away.”

  I told the families to wait for just a little bit longer and I’d get the bodies of their loved ones released. Lyle followed me back to my office.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Lyle said. “I thought I heard you tell them their family died of hypothermia?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Morris,” Lyle said, “their damn hands and feet were cut off!”

  “Were they?” I said. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Lizzie said some DA called her,” Lyle said. “You aware of that?”

  I opened the door to my office and let Lyle stand in the hall. “How about you take today off and drive down and see your daughter,” I said. “Shoot, take the whole week off. Fly out to California and see your son. When was the last time you spent the holidays with your kids?”

  “I ain’t just showing up at their doorstep dressed like Santa,” Lyle said.

  “Well, try calling. See what happens.”

>   Lyle squinted at me and rolled his tongue against his cheek. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  LIZZIE ANSWERED ON the first ring. “They’re all wrapped up and ready to go,” she said.

  “How do they look?” I asked.

  I heard Lizzie sigh on the other end of the line. “I had to use fishing line to sew the boys’ feet back on; Hawkins had some thirty-five-pound test that worked great,” she said. “It should hold.”

  “I appreciate this, Lizzie,” I said. “More than you’ll ever know.”

  “What do you want me to do about this DA who keeps calling?”

  “Tell him to call me if he has any questions,” I said. “The family hasn’t asked for anything, and it’s not his case.”

  “You’ve got all the paperwork there?” Lizzie asked.

  “Right in front of me,” I said. “I’ll sign off on it and get you a copy.”

  “Would my dad have done this?” Lizzie asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if you should have.”

  “Hawkins said that if there was a problem, he’d take the blame,” Lizzie said. “Said that’s how it’s always worked here. ‘Let the shit roll downhill’ were his exact words.”

  My recollections of Lizzie’s father had grown muddy in my mind—my memories colored more for what I wished were true than what actually was. We’d worked together for a long while, and time spares no one.

  “Tell Hawkins I won’t forget this,” I said.

  “Sheriff,” Lizzie said, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why’d you come back here all those years ago? The whole world was open to you.”

  I knew that Lizzie had some sense of my history. That I’d fought in Korea, had spent a time as an advisor in Vietnam, had done a turn working for Claxson Oil after I nearly murdered Milton Stairs, spending those ruined years at the Salton Sea, making mistakes I’d spend the rest of my life trying to rectify, though I never did, though I never will.

  “The world had turned acrid,” I said. “I was hoping I’d find some peace in Granite City.”

  “Did that work?”

  “I found a woman I loved,” I said, “and for a long time, Lizzie, that was enough. But now I don’t know.”

  AFTER WE HUNG up, I pulled out a piece of letterhead and scratched out a three-sentence letter of resignation. I held it in my hands and ran my fingers over every word, every period. I’d been the sheriff of Granite City for thirty-five years, and in that time, I’d tried to change the course of my life. In Korea, I’d killed hundreds of men. And then the SOP changed. Kill them all. Kill everyone in sight. And I did that. I did that. Men. Women. Children. I was the gun. By the time I ended up at the Salton Sea, I barely recognized myself most mornings, each day there a week of misery, until it all came burning down on me, chasing me back home.

  Before Korea, I’d never broken the law. Hadn’t even had a sip of liquor before I was of age. And since, I have spent my life trying to undo the past, attempting to do the legitimate thing, like not beating the men who hit their wives, because the law for too long said we couldn’t hold them. The law certainly said we couldn’t take a blackjack to their Achilles, which is what I wanted desperately to do, to see these men limp the rest of their lives, to know they’d never be able to get away from me. Instead, I would gather evidence. I would wait for the next misdemeanor and tack on a battery charge, bring it up to felony, and hope that they resisted arrest. Like Gina Morrow’s ex-husband, Wayne, who still manages the Ben Franklin on E. Laurelhurst, and who is missing the pinky toe on his right foot because he chose to run when I showed up with handcuffs. He doesn’t run anymore.

  I’d followed the letter of the law, no matter my opinion of it. What good did it do? The bad people were always going to win. Once they reached the top, worse people would come to topple them. The last good man was no better than his desire for revenge. God himself was spiteful. We can’t ask more of our own kind, can we? Couldn’t I have lied to Gina Morrow and told her that Wayne had been in a car accident, that he’d been burned alive, instead of letting him live in her house for months after the first call I received? How easy it would have been to stage Wayne’s demise. Couldn’t I have done that to every man who put a hand on a woman? I could have. I could have cleaned this world of a few dirty spots.

  But Margaret, she would have smelled the violence on me. She would have tasted the mendacity. Never did there exist a woman borne out of more kindness and propriety. If she knew the man I was capable of becoming, again, she would have walked out the door and never come back.

  And so, there I was with my letter of resignation in my hand and an autopsy report on my desk. Both documents were lies. Inside the autopsy report, Dr. Lizzie DiGiangreco, whose dead father I had carried to his grave, stated that all four members of the Klein family had died of exposure and acute hypothermia. She further stated that all members of the family were fully intact—that all hands and feet were connected. An accidental death, no note of foul play.

  In my official report, typed the night previous on my old Olivetti, I stated that it was my belief that the Klein family had succumbed during the night of November 11, 1998. The almanac noted November 11, 1998, as being the coldest day of the month during what became the coldest winter in record. Over a foot of snow fell that night.

  Case closed.

  SNOW FELL IN Granite City the night I quit, too. It was Christmas Eve, and though the roads were slippery and runny, I called Lyle and asked him to meet me at Shake’s Bar. We sat for a long time in a small booth sipping beer and eating stale nuts, an old Johnny Mathis Christmas song bleating out of the tape player Zep, the bartender, pulled out on special occasions. That next day I’d recommend to the mayor that Lyle be named interim sheriff, a post he would eventually keep for three years until he died from emphysema.

  “You know what, Morris,” Lyle said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about just closing up shop and moving to Hawaii. You know I was stationed out there, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “In those days, I raised a lot of hell,” Lyle said. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and I thought maybe inside his head he was on liberty in Maui. “I don’t regret it, though. We all had to sow our oats at some point. Make bad decisions and then just close those chapters and move on.”

  “I have so much regret,” I said. “I’ve loved two women in my life, Lyle, and both of them are dead now. From day one, I’ve tried to follow orders. Somewhere along the way, I think I lost sight of what that meant. Even when right was wrong. What has it gotten me?”

  “Respect.”

  “They gonna put that on my tombstone? Here rests a guy people respected.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad, when you think about it.” Lyle took a final pull from his beer, then coughed wetly. “You did right by everyone, Morris,” he said. “By everyone.” He slid out of the booth, tugged on a knit cap and gloves. “I called my kids, like you said. Daughter told me I was about five years too late.”

  “Keep calling,” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” Lyle said. “The thing of it is, Morris, nights like this? You know, it’s arbitrary. Holidays? What are we celebrating? I don’t believe in God, and finding those kids up there on Yeach, that didn’t make it any better. I mean, what are we celebrating?”

  “That we made it through,” I said.

  Lyle considered that for a moment. “I shouldn’t have to be told to call my kids. I shouldn’t even have been at work today.” He shook his head. “My dad was a cop. And you know what he did on Christmas Eve?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing. He did nothing at all. He was just my dad. I don’t know how that got misplaced in me.”

  “Go home, Lyle,” I said. “You’re drunk.” Which wasn’t true.

  “I will,” he said. He zipped his coat up to the neck. Took a long look out the window to the empty boulevard, then adjusted his cap, so that it rested just above h
is eyebrows. “I thought I’d just take a drive through the streets. Make sure no one’s stuck in the snow. You could die from the cold out there tonight.”

  I knew that he had seen my report, had seen Lizzie’s autopsy report, and that he didn’t care. Or, rather, that he cared a great deal, but that he knew I’d made a judgment call not based on the nuts and bolts of the law, but on how people feel inside. I would let the Kleins and Mrs. Pellet have their sad truth, even if it wasn’t reality. I would give them that dignity.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  PILGRIMS

  The drive from Palm Springs to the Woods Detention Center just south of Castaic usually takes Tania a bit over three hours, mostly because she refuses to speed. She was always eager to see Don, her husband of less than one year, but there was something about breaking the law to see her incarcerated husband that didn’t seem logical. Of all the choices she was forced to make in her life, Tania figured putting her car on cruise control three miles beneath the speed limit was the easiest to make. And besides, it was one less thing to concentrate on, which was good since Tania liked to listen to audio books while driving. Fifty-seven years she’d been alive, but it was only in the last three that she’d found the comfort of literature, though she understood that her predilection toward spy novels didn’t exactly make her feel intellectually invigorated. It occurred to her a few weeks ago that she’d be wise to pick up some nonfiction titles, too, see if she might learn something to tell Don about during those weekly moments when conversation halted and both of them realized how little they knew about each other.

  So today, on a Saturday in January, Tania listens to a book about the Pilgrims’ first winter. When she took it out from the library, the librarian said, “You understand that this is eighteen hours, right?”

  “No,” Tania said. “Is that a problem?”

  The librarian, a woman named Crystal that Tania sometimes saw playing slots at the Indian casino where she cocktailed, but who never seemed to recognize Tania in either place, shrugged. “It’s just that you might not finish it in time.”