The Black Rose Restaurant was the former Rocco’s Bar. The name change had become necessary two years before, as the owners struggled to adapt to the liberalization of Utah’s byzantine liquor rules. They called the Rose a “restaurant” so that they could legally serve a full range of alcoholic drinks, including “heavy” beer — brew containing more than 3.2 percent alcohol by volume. This was important to Boog DeKlerk, who favoured Guinness, which even in its American version contained over four percent. Henry, who didn’t drink, found it all too confusing and kept quiet, but this didn’t stop DeKlerk from holding forth on “Mormon bluestocking laws” whenever he encountered Henry.
Henry arrived at the Rose to find Phil already in the regular booth with DeKlerk. They were on their second round. An untouched plate of deep-fried zucchini and garlic sauce sat at the edge of the table. The big man looked up from his Guinness. “You’re late.”
Mohlman said, “He’s not bloody late.”
“Yeah, you’re late, preppy. We settled everything.”
“Nothing’s settled,” Phil said.
Henry sat beside his partner. The waitress came over and asked if the food was okay. That was another complication. Utah liquor rules for this kind of establishment required the patron to order food with his drink. No one knew why the law was this way. Sometimes you just can’t win with the Mormon thing, Henry thought. The regulations compelled DeKlerk to choose something from the menu even when he wasn’t hungry. He had put on weight, for which, absurdly, he blamed Henry. Henry ordered a tall Coke and DeKlerk glared at him.
“No eats, Pastern? Going home for a leisurely dinner with the wife in your desert spa?”
DeKlerk wasn’t married, and Henry had once suggested to Phil that Boog was married to the night shift. “Not true, Henry. Boog is married to his pension plan. He hopes to retire to a place in the desert in the next year, and that’s why he envies you your new house. He also suffers from the delusion that the Utah desert is the South African veld. Jesus wept. Some people just can’t bury their childhood.”
Phil now turned to Henry amiably. “Discover any stone killers hiding on Hollis Street, Henry?”
“Not among the even numbers,” Henry replied.
“I didn’t get far with the odd addresses,” Mohlman said. “What’s Jackson doing now?”
“Stuck in the Second House, best I can tell. I like him. He’s conscientious —”
Boog DeKlerk hated being left out. “I don’t figure the husband for it, but he’s the key to getting the killers.”
Phil continued with Henry. “I did run into Ronald Devereau at Number 13, next to Jerry Proffet, one of the two-storeys. Used to be vice-president of the street group for a brief time. I got no further. But Boog has a point. Finding Tom Watson tops our priorities.”
DeKlerk chewed on a zucchini stick while he waited for a chance to pontificate.
“Any sign of him?” Henry asked.
“Nope. Didn’t show up for work. We issued a BOLO on the truck. Nothing. Chief Grady’s office took care of getting the warrant out on Watson. Suspicion of homicide.”
Boog grunted. “Should be for trafficking, that’s the better rap. We know he pushes drugs. This is pre-eminently a drug case, a gang making a point.”
“A moot point if Watson is dead,” Henry said.
“I’ll buy that, preppy,” Boog said. “Watson is in a dumpster somewhere in the Valley. His head may be in a different dumpster.”
Phil, tiring of Boog’s combativeness, waved him off. Henry noted that his partner often turned morose in the Black Rose. The restaurant had no connection to the famous Black Rose Irish pub down by Faneuil Hall, but Phil grew nostalgic for Boston whenever he drank here.
Henry reflected on the mentality of the three of them. The South African. The boy from Charlestown. The lapsed Mormon. They all lived in Utah and they weren’t going anyplace, but still they positioned themselves as outsiders. It was an immature attitude, he recognized.
Henry was exhausted and wanted to get home to Theresa. His attention wandered. With its black lacquered bar backed by a big mirror, pinpoint red lights limning the mirror and baseboards around the room, the place resembled a Chinese restaurant more than an Irish pub. Due to another arcane state rule, there were no bottles of booze behind the bar. Larry the bartender was fed up with explaining that he wasn’t Rocco, there never had been a Rocco, and no, he wasn’t Irish. The bar/restaurant had trouble fixing on an identity — just like the community along Hollis Street, Henry mused. Maybe like himself, Phil, and Boog, too.
DeKlerk hammered on the drug argument. “I can get FLIR warrants on the units at Numbers 6 and 8.”
Phil and Henry remained skeptical. Forward Looking Infrared spectrum analysis was a police tool derived from military technology. It registered the heat signature from a building, in this context the juice used by grow lights in a marijuana operation. Because of its lack of subtlety — planes flying low overhead — and the emerging controversy over drone surveillance, the courts were becoming restrictive in the warrants they granted. But police forces loved the technology.
“On two separate, unrelated houses?” Phil said. “Not enough grounds for a flyover. Any evidence risks being thrown out as unreasonable.”
“Un-this, un-that. Hell, Phil, we’ll have the judge onside. Blood’s still wet.”
Henry held his opinion back, but he was with the Drug Squad chief on the issue of authorization: in the aftermath of the discovery of a beheaded female victim, the court would be sympathetic to a FLIR scan warrant. He was more concerned about a breach of privacy allegation from an individual resident causing all of them to clam up. FLIR scans would increase the circus atmosphere on Hollis Street, when what was needed was calm, door-to-door police work.
Phil remained antagonistic. “The locals we’ve met so far tend to be snoops, old ladies and their equivalents, living their lives at the front curtain. I don’t know, there’s something about the residents on this street. You do a flyover — what, three or four passes? — someone is bound to call in a complaint —”
DeKlerk burst in. “I don’t want my men knocking politely on the front door and trying the lock. Booby traps are a real danger.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Henry said, taking the unlikely role of mediator between the senior detectives. “You have car-top scanner units, don’t you?”
“Don’t work as well. And with this heat, the contrast …”
“But well enough, I understand,” Henry said.
Henry got the other look from Phil and Boog, not the Mormon Look, but the one that said, “You learn that crap in the FBI in Washington?”
Phil thumped the table and said, “Done! They’ll blend in with the rest of the bullshit going down.”
DeKlerk was satisfied. The drive-by unit looked odd perched on the roof of a vehicle, but a couple of passes up and down Hollis would be quick and minimally intrusive.
It was Phil who wouldn’t let it go. “That’s all we do on that front. Leadership stays with Homicide.”
DeKlerk smirked. “Make it a drug case, Phil, and we easily explain the decapitation and the pipe bomb. I’ll tell Grady the cartel moved a little farther north than usual.”
“I don’t plan to explain anything away,” Phil lashed out. “I plan to solve it.”
The Drug Squad chief sat back in the banquette. “Whatever. Grady wants us to wrap it up fast.”
Henry had heard the refrain many times. “We have to wrap it up.” It was a reference to West Valley’s most notorious case. The tragedy of Susan Powell haunted every cop in West Valley, even those who had joined the force later. Susan Powell was a model wife, the mother of two boys, lovable and loved, who vanished from the Valley on a December day in 2009 and was never found. The case gripped the city for months. Half the citizenry had the husband for it, but as many wanted something else to be true, an abduction by an outsider, for example. West Valley, already in the shadow of Salt Lake, didn’t need a reputation as an unsafe place for women, and the pressure to solve the kidnapping rose daily. The police force believed that her abductor had drowned her, but Henry had doubts, since it was almost impossible to sink a body in the Great Salt Lake, and the rivers up in the Wasatch Range are fast-flowing and unlikely to conceal a corpse for long. The killer had dumped her in the woods up near Park City, he believed. West Valley had its share of violent crime, but this one resonated, and as the case dragged on, the public started to suspect incompetence within the police department. In 2012, Susan’s husband, who had relocated to Washington State, killed his two sons and then himself. The case was fresh in everyone’s memory. Many a West Valley officer had been heard to say with gallows humour that it would have been helpful if he had left coordinates for finding Susan’s body before he offed himself. The local chief, Grady, pledged to keep the case open. As if he had the choice. No one wanted a second Susan Powell.
“We got a profile of the husband?” DeKlerk asked.
“Watson. Age forty-two, no criminal record, two non-criminal citations way back for drinking in a public place,” Mohlman stated. “Employed as a journeyman electrician at Salaberry Electric in Salt Lake. Office says he didn’t show up today, and his usual partner reports no contact since the day before, when he acted, quote, ‘like all was normal.’ No one so far on Hollis reports seeing him leave for work.”
“No one saw anything,” DeKlerk said. “Ya know, after a while, the cannabis starts to ooze out of a home factory like that. Somebody shoulda noticed.”
“Like they’re olfactorily deaf and blind,” Phil added.
They were venting; they couldn’t help themselves. Henry chimed in: “I agree. I’ve met less than half of them, but they all talk about ‘standards’ and ‘neighbourliness.’ Yet a grow house? Nobody paying attention when every house can see — smell — every other house, and you have to drive past the murder site to exit the street?”
“What’s your point?” Boog DeKlerk said.
“We find it strange that nobody saw anything. What if the opposite was true? All the residents actually knew about the grow operation.”
“And tipped off the Mob,” DeKlerk tossed in.
Phil was unpersuaded. “Nice to see you two bonding, but one way or another, Tom Watson fled the scene and remains our top candidate.”
The Guinness now tipped DeKlerk over into belligerence. It was no longer a matter of who had jurisdiction here — DeKlerk knew that he was far better plugged in to the convoluted drug trade than Homicide, and he only need bide his time. “So why can’t you Eastern pantywaists find one bloodstained electrician in a van in a state of only 444,000 people?”
Phil never apologized for his Boston roots, especially not in the Black Rose, and especially not to the South African. “Get out of our way and we’ll solve this.”
“Why haven’t you arrested anyone, Pastern?”
Phil won Henry’s everlasting loyalty by bristling back. “My partner’s the one who thought to look next door for the grow operation. Otherwise, you’d still be walking around Number 3 Hollis with Al Pacino’s dick in your hand.”
Even Boog DeKlerk had to laugh.
The two senior detectives ordered another round. The zucchini had turned flaccid and the garlic sauce had coagulated. Henry excused himself and drove home to have dinner with Theresa.