A Killing in Zion (11 page)

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 extended 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.”

“The men in those cells are suspects in a murder investigation.” I stopped halfway up the stairs, turned, and looked down at Abner to drive my point across. “They're apostles in the Fundamentalist Church of Saints, which means they're part of Johnston's inner circle. As I'm sure you've figured out by now, they're uncooperative in the extreme, and we have reason to believe, based on our past interactions with them, that not a single one of them would have submitted willingly to questioning unless we arrested them. They left us with no choice.”

“Aren't you violating their rights by arresting them in this manner?” pressed Abner. “Aren't you targeting them merely because they disagree with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and have the gumption to—”

“This has nothing to do with the LDS Church,” I shot back firmly. “We are conducting a homicide investigation and we cannot rule any of those men out as suspects unless we've had a chance to question each one separately. Is that clear?”

“Why arrest all of them?” he asked. “I mean, we've had other homicides in this town before and you don't round up dozens of people.…”

“C'mon, Ab, do the math! We didn't arrest dozens! There are eleven men downstairs, ten of 'em apostles in the Fundamentalist Church of Saints, and the other one's the son of Johnston's successor, who's nowhere to be found. That's not even a full dozen, much less ‘dozens' plural.”

“All right, you got me on that one,” said Abner, grinning sheepishly. “What about you, Detective Oveson? Aren't you a Mormon?”

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “What of it? Mormons rejected polygamy long ago.”

“You must have ancestors who were polygamists,” he said. “How do you feel about them?”

“This isn't about my ancestors, or yours, or anybody else's,” I said. “It's about finding out who murdered LeGrand Johnston and Volney Mason. And believe me when I say we will find out. Now, if you'll excuse me, Ab, I've got a meeting I'm late for.”

I continued up the stairs, and Abner called out from behind me. “Crack this one and you might be on the radio again!”

*   *   *

Half jogging, I passed my office and went instead to the Homicide Squad's meeting room at the end of the corridor. Wit Dunaway sat on top of a long desk in the front of the room, thumbing through a report in a folder. All of the other men from the Homicide and Anti-Polygamy squads sat in wooden chairs. I peeked up at the clock as I planted my bottom on a hard seat near Roscoe. A few minutes past three o'clock.

“Art, how nice of you to join us,” Wit said. “Now we can get started.”

Light laughter around the room, and maybe a scowl from Pace Newbold, who could always be counted on for a dirty look.

Wit eased off the desk and began pacing, scanning the room as he briefed. “Interrogations will occur under my supervision. A stenographer will be posted in each room, so please speak up and make sure your suspect does likewise. I understand their attorney, Mr. Sondrup, will be sitting in on as many of these as he can, so show him some courtesy. If you get any bites, no matter how small, come see me.”

The door flew open and in strode a Homicide dick, J. D. Lythgoe, gaunt and gray haired, the old man of the bunch in his early sixties. He walked up to Wit and said something that I could not make out in a hushed tone, but Wit was concentrating on his every word, nodding slowly the entire time. Lythgoe took his seat behind me and a soft “Thank you, John” came from Wit.

“I've just been told by Detective Lythgoe that Mr. Sondrup, the attorney for the suspects, is downstairs as we speak advising his clients not to cooperate.”

Angry whispers and furrowed brows spread around the room.

“You know what to do,” said Wit. “Get busy.”

Desk legs scraped linoleum. Men stood. A line formed at the door. Amid the muted conversations, Wit walked over to me.

“Why don't you start in on Covington, since you brought him in,” he said. “We've still got the girl in a separate holding cell. She's stubborn as all get-out, I'll give her that much. Maybe this mute routine of hers isn't an act after all. Anyhow, I'm going to go to work on her one more time before the fellas from the State Industrial School drop by to haul her off. When you're done, maybe you can check in and see how things are shaping up.” His face brightened. “Oh yeah…”

He opened his file folder and took out an eight-by-ten picture and handed it to me. I looked at it. It was a mug shot of the girl from the Lincoln Street church.

“Do me a favor, will you?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Ask around, see if any of the men know her. Maybe we can ID her that way, if she's intent on keeping her trap shut.”

“Will do.”

*   *   *

After talking to Wit, I went to the long hallway of interrogation rooms in the basement, conveniently located near the jail cells. The corridor was packed with plainclothes detectives and a sprinkling of patrolmen, and I could hardly hear myself think in the din. I carried the picture of the girl in my hand as I squeezed past them. Officer Gus Nibley, uniformed and without a speck of dust on his cap's visor, wormed through a wall of men to hand me an incomplete police report attached to a clipboard with Alma Covington's name at the top and a freshly sharpened pencil, the tools I needed to start my interrogation. Normally soft-spoken, Nibley had to raise his voice considerably for me to hear him.