A Killing in Zion Read online

  “I’d rather not.…”

  “C’mon. Have a look. You’ll feel better.” She tipped her head at the window. “Go on. Do it.”

  With a trembling hand, I slid open the gray curtain and gazed out. It all appeared so small, that patchwork quilt of earth below, with a surprising number of green squares for a city at the desert’s edge. Mountains hemmed in the valley like a fortress, except for the northwest corner, where the Oquirrh Mountains tapered off at the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Even from thousands of feet above the valley’s southern end, the downtown and the granite spires of the Salt Lake Temple on the northern side were clearly visible. The sixteen-story Walker Bank Building dominated the skyline, with its towering radio antennae and WALKER BANK spelled out in tall electric-lit words. From this distance, I could even see the giant white U built on the side of Mount Van Cott, a symbol of the University of Utah, whose campus of columned, ivy-covered buildings nestled against the Wasatch Range nearby. The airplane dipped lower, its winged shadow swimming over farms and rural roads in the valley’s middle. Wide streets intersected in a perfect grid originating from the downtown temple, a deliberate plan by Brigham Young and the early settlers of this place. Thanks to them, it is difficult—if not impossible—to get lost in Salt Lake City.

  Parting those curtains worked wonders. The dread I experienced only minutes earlier eased. I uncoiled in my seat and loosened my hold on the armrests. The airplane still jumped about in the skies, but now that we hovered low over the city, it all seemed so much less perilous than before, perhaps because I knew my destination was right under me. Even though I grew up in the next valley to the south, Salt Lake City felt more like home than my actual hometown of American Fork. This is where I lived out my various roles as husband, father, police detective, and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  Salt Lake City greeted me like an old friend. Salt Lake City, with streets so wide that back in pioneer times a team of four oxen pulling a covered wagon could make a U-turn with room to spare. Salt Lake City, home to ice cream parlors, movie palaces, and the most majestic state capitol building in the country, at the top of a hill overlooking the valley. Salt Lake City, where trolley bells rang like the heartbeat of a vibrant commercial center that a mere hundred years ago was uninhabited scrub. It all seemed so familiar, as if it were part of me, and I part of it.

  “See?” said Sarah Jane.

  “What?”

  “I told you if you opened the curtains you’d feel better.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I know I’m right.” She smiled. “You think the firefighters have got all those blazes licked, Dad?”

  I shook my head, craning my neck to get a better look at the swirling smoke clouds swallowing up the tops of the Wasatch Mountains. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “That’s too bad. Mary says half the state is burning up. Her uncle is a volunteer with the Provo Hook and Ladder.”

  “That’s brave of him,” I said as we glided low over the airfield.

  The airplane touched down on a dusty runway within sight of the Great Salt Lake. With propellers still roaring, it taxied past a cluster of arched steel hangars and some small wood-frame buildings that housed aviation schools and aircraft rental joints. It came to a halt near a new municipal terminal—built last year to attract visitors—where dozens of other airplanes were parked. I glanced back at Clara and Hyrum, both awake now and smiling, having slept the entire flight.

  “Are we there yet?” said Hyrum, wiping cinders from his eyes. “That was fast.”

  When the airplane stopped moving, unfastening seat belts clicked away and us passengers rose in unison, yet we all remained hunched thanks to the low ceiling. I pulled our luggage out of overhead compartments and the stewardess opened the door at the rear of the airplane. The kids were out of their seats first, scurrying toward the exit.

  “I can’t wait to get home and try out that new hammock you got me for my birthday,” I told Clara as we inched forward, on our way to the oval-shaped doorway lit by sun. “The way I see it, it won’t hurt to miss one day of church.”

  She shrugged. “Somehow, I get the idea Heavenly Father will forgive you. Last time you missed was back in twenty-seven, when you had whooping cough, and you only missed once, even though when you went the next Sunday you were still sick as a dog. You were hacking away in sacrament meeting. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I’ll take the rest of the day off, my last few hours of freedom before going back to work tomorrow. Live like a king.”

  Bowing slightly to pass through the doorway, I maneuvered the two suitcases outside and clanked down the metal staircase. I reached the ground and beheld an unexpected scene: A massive crowd of Ovesons—my mother, three brothers, a trio of corresponding in-laws, and the hordes of children who accompanied them—blocked my way to the airport entrance. Big words in black paint on a homemade banner cried out, WELCOME HOME, RADIO STAR!!! They waved and cheered and erupted into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as I approached. Did I mention that there’s nothing Mormons love more than to show up at airports in big crowds to greet arriving family members?

  Clara squeezed my elbow and I turned halfway to her as we crossed the sun-drenched tarmac.

  “What was that about trying out your hammock and living like a king?” she asked, with a spirited laugh. “Looks like you’re going to have to take a detour through your hometown for Mom’s pot roast first.”

  Two

  Crowds churned in the Public Safety Building’s cavernous lobby. Here, one could encounter a microcosm of the society beyond these walls: purposeful men and women filing complaints or renewing driver’s licenses; bleary-eyed hookers in tattered stockings, indifferent to the world around them, and their antsy customers, pleading to be released; sullen truants busted for sluffing school; belligerents who used force instead of words to solve disputes; and, of course, police, multitudes of police, both the plainclothes and uniformed varieties. Some milled about; others moved more deliberately. I fell into the latter category. I darted around men and women on my way to the marble staircase rising to the second floor, the location of my office.

  A three-story building at 105 South State, it opened its doors in 1908, first as headquarters of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Seven years later, the YMCA relocated to a smaller, less expensive place, and the Salt Lake City Police Department moved in. Public Safety had the look and feel of those stodgy federal buildings you see in the District of Columbia, with its high ceilings, frosted glass windows on the doors, and marble staircases connecting to other floors.

  The detective bureau shared the second floor with the court chambers and pressroom, and at any given time of day clacking typewriters echoed through the halls like a troupe of eager tap dancers. The building came with strange charms, such as dimly lit corridors leading to sealed-off doors or bricked-up dead ends. On one floor, a padlocked entrance prevented access to an empty swimming pool that hadn’t been used in years. Back in the early twenties, policemen swam laps as part of a calisthenics regimen, but pool maintenance became too expensive and the chief ordered it drained and closed to cut operational expenses.

  I arrived at a door with frosted glass that read ROOM 224, and then below that, ANTI-POLYGAMY SQUAD in large black serif letters with gold shadowing. My office.

  Once upon a time, not long ago, I used to work a few doors down, in Morals, a thirteen-man unit responsible for busting prostitutes, drug peddlers, bookmakers, pornography merchants, and all other purveyors of vice. We raided illicit gambling joints, holes-in-the-wall that served liquor without a license, and fleabag hotels specializing in noontime whoopee for married fellows and their paid ladies. We confiscated slot machines, bottles of rotgut sans government seals, boxes of stag films and dirty magazines, and nearly every kind of illegal substance you can imagine. For reasons that eluded me, every man in the Morals Squad—including me—was a Latter-day Saint, a fact that irritated the gen
tiles on the force (“gentile” is a term that Mormons appropriated from Jews to describe non-Mormons), who took to calling us “the Mormon Squad.”

  My transfer to the Anti-Polygamy Squad happened in March. On a chilly morning, the mayor of Salt Lake City summoned me to his office without giving a reason why. I arrived with my stomach tied in knots. Mayor Bennett Cummings, a man with a reputation as a crusader, waited in the anteroom to greet me personally, as effusive as I’d ever seen another man. He invited me into his office, where, in the presence of my superiors, Chief William Cowley and Captain Buddy Hawkins, he asked me to head the notorious squad.

  The police chief back in 1914, Alonzo Burbidge, had created the unit in response to a series of muckraking articles splashed across page A1 of the Salt Lake Examiner revealing that thousands of polygamists resided in the Salt Lake Valley. Their presence greatly embarrassed leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose president, Wilford Woodruff, had issued a manifesto in 1890 banning the practice of plural marriage. Some purists, believing Woodruff had betrayed early church doctrines in exchange for achieving statehood for Utah, insisted on adhering to the controversial practice and continued to wed multiple wives. Police and politicians alike turned a blind eye to the practice until the Examiner’s exposés about polygamists not only living, but thriving, in and around Salt Lake City brought national attention to them.

  The police cracked down by forming the Anti-Polygamy Squad. Its mission, according to Burbidge, was to “rid our great city of the scourge of plural marriage.” Burbidge assigned eight of his top detectives to the squad, to show that his intention to break the “local polygamy racket” (as he called it) was sincere. The squad made some early headway, arresting patriarchs and driving the more conflict-averse practitioners out of the city. However, in time, the police backed away from the effort, opting instead to focus on other crimes that seemed to be more pressing, such as vice and homicides. The squad remained dormant for years, run mostly by one man, Detective John Goetten, until his retirement earlier this year. Goetten had done a halfhearted job of collecting files on suspects and rarely arresting and only briefly detaining the more flagrant zealots.

  Three things—Goetten’s departure, the election of an overzealous new mayor, and the fame I gained from arresting the Running Board Bandit—resulted in the revival of the moribund Anti-Polygamy Squad with me at its head. “Would you do us the honor of bringing your leadership abilities to this unit?” the mayor asked me. How could I refuse? Still, when he asked, I excused myself from his office, claiming that I had to use the restroom. I nearly killed myself—and one or two other people—sprinting to a row of Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph booths near the building’s entrance. I flung open the mahogany-and-glass door, lifted the receiver, dropped a coin in the slot, and called Clara at East High while she was in the middle of choir rehearsal. I told her about the offer and asked her if I should take the job. She advised me to go with my gut instincts. When I voiced concerns that the job would be demanding and may take me away from our baby—due to be born in late July—she told me I was worrying too much. “You made time for the other two,” she told me. “You’ll make time for this one.”

  After five minutes on the telephone with Clara, I rushed back to the mayor’s office, and—sweating and struggling to catch my breath—said yes to the job, while the perplexed trio of men looked on, perhaps wondering whether I’d lost my mind. The next day, Cummings held a press conference to announce the squad’s rebirth. Predictably, the critics made noise right away. The mayor’s opposition, mainly city councilors who either coveted Cummings’s job or hated him for the toll that his numerous municipal crusades took on them and their allies, lashed out, referring to the squad as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Cummings responded defiantly by appointing three men to assist me: Roscoe Lund, a uniformed patrolman; Jared Weeks, a motorcycle cop from the Traffic Division; and Myron Adler, who’d previously toiled away in the basement records room.

  Roscoe came at my request. I must admit I encountered some resistance from my superiors when I asked if he could join my squad, due mainly to his long track record of insubordination. Before being reassigned here, Roscoe had been unhappily guiding traffic downtown, the lowest spot on the police totem pole. I promised my commander to keep him on a leash, so the brass reluctantly upgraded him to the detective bureau on a trial basis. If he behaves, Captain Buddy Hawkins, chief of detectives, told me, he’ll be allowed to stay on the squad. Roscoe and I had a long history together. We had been partners during our short stint as deputies for the Salt Lake County sheriff’s office back in 1930. We were teamed up again in the Salt Lake City Police Department that same year as uniformed patrolmen. Naturally, we developed a strong bond after working together for so long. Roscoe had also grown close to my wife and children over time, visiting our house for dinner once or twice a month and bringing my daughter and son gifts at Christmastime and on their birthdays. Having him on the squad reassured me, knowing such a close ally was in my corner.

  The other two men, Jared Weeks and Myron Adler, took time to warm up to. Weeks, a man in his mid-to-late twenties, was particularly hard to read. I always found him upbeat, the kind of fella who said, “Just fine, and you?” whenever you asked him how he was doing. He preferred to call me “boss” and carried a battered leather satchel around with him wherever he went. He never said anything about his personal life or his family—if he even had one. He towered at about six feet eight inches, owing to a case of Marfan syndrome (which Abe Lincoln was thought to have), and his striking features included a golden-haired Caesar cut, blue eyes, and a wide mouth that stood out on such a lean face. He actually had asked for a transfer to the Anti-Polygamy Squad after he saw a posting for it on a departmental job listings bulletin board, so I arranged an interview with him. His responses to my questions were brief yet friendly, and by the time he left, I found myself impressed with his earnestness and dedication. Before arriving here, he had acquired a tan from sitting on a Harley-Davidson day in, day out parked behind a Cream o’Weber Dairy billboard by the side of Highway 91, ticketing speeders. Once on the squad, he immersed himself in researching the unusual world of plural marriage and emerged as something of an expert on all things polygamy, but never in a show-offy way. He was as helpful as he was private. At the end of each day, I always wondered where he went.

  By contrast, I found Myron Adler impassive yet talkative, a man who rarely filtered his words before saying them and probably kept no secrets. He’d worked as a clerk down in records since joining the force in early December of 1931. He kept his short, wavy black hair combed neatly to the right, and gazed out at the world through wire-rimmed glasses with thick eyebrows above the lenses. His cleft chin drew attention away from his narrow lips. Alert eyes, enlarged by Coke-bottle lenses, seldom blinked. I could not even venture a guess, from his blank expression, what thoughts may’ve been racing through his mind at any given moment.

  I knew Adler to be the sole Jew on the payroll of the Salt Lake City Police Department. When William Cowley replaced Otis Ballard as chief of police in the fall of 1931, one of the first things he did was hire a Jew and a colored man named Elbridge Davis. It was all a part of Cowley’s campaign to prove to the public that the city’s police force would no longer tolerate bigotry or discrimination in its ranks. Adler ended up in the records room, the remotest part of Public Safety. I’m not sure where Davis went—I seldom saw him—but it probably wasn’t much better. I could not tell, for the life of me, whether Adler was happy to be promoted to plainclothes detective. He was never demonstrative with his feelings. Cowley himself personally promoted Adler to the squad. The chief told me he felt confident that Myron was ready to advance to the detective bureau. However, Cowley exercised caution in appointing Myron to a unit where anti-Semitic prejudice would be minimal, if not nonexistent. The records division’s loss was our gain. Myron brought with him an uncanny ability to remember a multitude of tiny details, the likes of whi
ch I’ve never witnessed before. He could tell you how many wives a particular polygamist had, or a suspect’s exact street address, date of birth, arrest date, and so on, without even having to look it up. And he’d always be right.

  “I’m what the alienists call an eidetic,” he informed me the day I met him in March. “Also known as a form-seer. It means I have a photographic memory. It’s a rare condition. I was one of eighteen subjects in a study at the University of Marburg, under the supervision of Dr. Erich Rudolf Jaensch. That was about six years ago, before Hitler and his Brownshirt henchmen took over. Too bad. It was a pretty place before that. I’d never set foot there now.”

  The revitalized Anti-Polygamy Squad had gone to work, in earnest, on the second of April, aggressively tracking down polygamists in our midst. My goal was to carry out mass arrests, to show the mayor that his money and resources were being well spent. I began my mission self-assured. I did not, however, anticipate that my foes would be so cunning. Locating them was the easy part. Unfortunately for me, these men turned out to be astonishingly adept at hiding their transgressions. It only took a few weeks as squad commander for me to realize that I was engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with men who always stayed one or two steps ahead of me. The prospect of catching up to them began to dim. By the middle of June, before I took my family to Los Angeles, Chief Cowley called me into his office. I correctly predicted what he was going to tell me. Show results, as soon as possible. I was right. The man wanted to see high-profile busts. Pronto.

  The pressure was on.

  Our small squad operated out of a spacious room, brimming with natural light thanks to tall windows on the east wall. Four desks easily fit in the office, each with a Royal typewriter, a telephone, a city directory, and a swivel chair. Two guest chairs sat side by side in a corner. Chest-high filing cabinets stood against the walls. The place still had that fresh-paint smell, and an oscillating fan circulated warm air blowing in through the open windows. The view looked out at a half-full parking lot housing a shiny fleet of black-and-white 1934 Ford Model 40 V8 Deluxe patrol cars, along with a scattering of unmarked police sedans.