The Long and Faraway Gone (18 page)

One hot summer Sunday—­it must have been late June or early July—­they all drove down to Lake Thunderbird to drink beer and water ski. “Lake Dirtybird,” everyone called it, because the water was a deep reddish brown. Janella's sister's boyfriend had loaned them his boat, under what false pretenses Wyatt couldn't imagine. O'Malley took control of the wheel and opened up the throttle. He blasted around the lake, ignoring the “No Wake” zones and seeing how closely he could cut past the shoreline. The girls in the back of the boat, Janella and Karlene and Theresa, laughed and gripped the gunwales and yelled at O'Malley to
“Slow down!”

Like he would ever do that.

“Never fear!” O'Malley had hollered to Wyatt over the roar of the engine, the pummeling of the wind. “These walls can't hold us!”

Wyatt located Jeff Eddy, as instructed, in the choicest of choice tailgating spots. Eddy was wearing a crimson sweater vest with a white OU insignia above his heart. He forked sausages on a grill almost as big as Wyatt's rented Altima and held court, surrounded by four guys dressed in similar fashion, of similar age and jowliness, with similar tipsy, shit-­eating grins.

The ladyfolk had hauled their high-­end canvas folding chairs, margaritas in the cup holders, upwind from the billowing grill smoke. They wriggled their toes, comparing pedicures.

“Even better,” Eddy was telling the others, “you 'member how Chunks here got his name? Night of that party we threw with the Deltas.”

“Oh, hell no,” one of the guys groaned. Chunks, presumably. The other guys grinned and snickered.

Eddy spotted Wyatt before Wyatt could make a break for it. “Wyatt, buddy!”

Eddy passed off the tongs so he could head over and give Wyatt's hand an overly hearty pump. And then another pump, a slap on the back. Wyatt couldn't tell you the last time someone had slapped him on the back.

“What are you drinking?” Eddy said. “We got anything you can think of.”

“A pisco sour if it's not too much trouble,” Wyatt said, just so he could appreciate the effort it took Eddy to maintain his totally bogus bonhomie. “No. How about a caipirinha?”

Eddy forced a laugh. “A beer all right?”

“You bet.”

Eddy found him a Sierra Nevada and introduced Wyatt to the other guys as his business associate from Las Vegas. In addition to Chunks, there was Otter, Goose, and Big Boy. Wyatt didn't bother trying to keep them straight.

“Where'd you go to school?” one of the guys asked Wyatt. “Just don't say Texas.”

“Or OSU!” another guy said.

Big Boy, clearly the drunkest of the bunch, was eyeing Wyatt, who had on a lightweight light gray suit, white shirt, no tie.

“So,” Big Boy said. “You just come from the prom?”

The other guys held their snickers and waited to see if Wyatt could take a little good-­natured shit or confirm their suspicion that he was some humorless, bed-­wetting liberal.

“Funeral,” Wyatt said. He looked down at his wing tips. “My mother.”

You could hear the condensation beading on the neck of Wyatt's beer bottle. The four guys stared at him, then looked away, then lifted their glasses and bottles, in perfect synchrony, to take a long, uncomfortable drink.

Big Boy and Goose were drinking whiskey, Otter beer, Chunks a margarita.

Wyatt guessed that Big Boy and Otter were in the energy business—­they were talkers, deal makers, hustlers. Chunks—­watcher, lurker—­was probably a lawyer. Taxes. Big Boy was the drunkest, but Wyatt thought it was probably Goose who had a problem with the bottle. His wife was the alpha blonde who kept glancing over at him, her mouth a tight seam. She was counting how many drinks her husband had, tapping her wedding ring against the side of her margarita glass.

One of the toughest things about being a detective, Wyatt supposed, was that you never really stopped detecting. You didn't get a coffee break.

Jeff Eddy put his hand on Wyatt's shoulder and forced another smile. This smile submitted even less willingly than the first one, like the driver after a high-­speed chase getting wrestled to the ground by cops.

“He's kidding,” Eddy said.

“I'm kidding,” Wyatt said. “It was just a cremation ceremony.”

From the stadium came a blast of brass as the OU marching band struck up the university fight song.

“Let's go watch some football,” Eddy said.

“Boomer!” Big Boy yelled.

W
YATT WOULD HAVE
preferred for Jeff Eddy to just cut to the chase, but he supposed there were worse ways to kill an evening. It was beautiful out, cool and crisp, and Eddy was buying the beer and bringing it to him. Wyatt was pretty sure Candace would kill him if she knew he was here, if he were ever brazen enough to call this “investigating.”

The third or fourth time Eddy went for beer, late in the second quarter, his wife scooted over to sit next to Wyatt. Her name was Karen. She was thin, expensively perfumed, with one eyebrow hiked in such a way that suggested either a natural haughty skepticism or recent facial work that had been done neither too well nor too wisely.

Wyatt tried to imagine what this fifty-­something woman had looked like when she was seventeen years old, what she'd been like, what future she'd dreamed of. He couldn't do it. She could have been anyone back then. Whoever she'd been back then could have become anyone.

“So,” Eddy's wife said, “you're the private investigator has my husband's panties all in a bunch.”

“I don't think I'm supposed to know that, Karen,” Wyatt said.

“Well.”

“Tell me more.”

“Not me.”

They watched the game for a few downs. Wyatt watched one of the Sooner defensive linemen at work against his opposite number—­probing, faking, charging, spinning, hammering, curling. Each play was a ballet, each attack a chess move designed with the next three or four in mind.

Wyatt thought it was probably the only useful advice his father had ever given him: Don't just watch the ball. The real game happens on the edges.

“I've been coming to these games for forty years,” Eddy's wife said. Her tone was neutral.

On a third-­and-­long, the Sooner lineman who Wyatt was tracking juked a blocker out of his shoes and broke through. The quarterback had to hurry his pass. It sailed high and wide.

“There are some parts of my life that feel now like they never happened,” Wyatt said. He thought of the two years he'd spent in Minneapolis, the year before that in Charlotte. “Do you know what I mean? It's not that I don't remember them. It's that I don't even remember to remember them.”

She nodded.

“How long have you and Jeff been married?” Wyatt said.

“Thirty-­one years.”

“Congratulations.”

Eddy's wife turned to him. She put her hand on his forearm. “I want to know why Greg didn't leave the Land Run to Jeff.”

“Ms. Kilkenny isn't a prostitute,” Wyatt said. “She's not a stripper or a gold digger. I don't know what your husband told you. There was no sexual or romantic component to her relationship with your late brother-­in-­law.”

“You're not listening to me,” Eddy's wife said.

Wyatt was surprised. He thought of himself as an excellent listener. His livelihood often depended upon it.

“I don't want to know why Greg left the Land Run to that girl,” she said. “I want to know why he didn't leave it to his own brother.”

Jeff Eddy had returned with the beer. His wife scooted back over to her seat, and he sat down next to Wyatt.

“Now then,” Eddy said. He lowered his voice, even though he didn't have to. The crowd was roaring, the band playing. “Let's talk some turkey.”

“Let's talk.”

“So you haven't mentioned it to Candace?” Eddy said. “This alleged new MAPS initiative?”

Alleged.
“Not yet,” Wyatt lied. “I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

Eddy nodded. He was studying Wyatt, eyes narrowed, trying to get a read on him.

“I'd like to employ your ser­vices,” he said finally. “With regard to the Land Run.”

“With regard to the Land Run?” Wyatt laughed. “I foresee a potential conflict of interest.”

“That's where you're wrong. And that's what you need to understand. Our interests, mine and Miss Kilkenny's, they're exactly aligned.”

Wyatt couldn't wait to hear this. “Go on.”

“Look. You think that girl is gonna be happy running that dump? You think she's gonna be happy a year from now when that dump goes bust and she loses everything?”

“Is that your plan? To keep screwing with her until she goes out of business?”

“What? No. I told you, I don't have anything to do with any of that. What I'm talking about, I'm talking about the reality of the situation. What does she know about running a place like that? Can I tell you a secret?”

“It won't leave this stadium.”

“My brother never made a dime. He worked there seven days a week since he was fifteen years old. He knew the business inside and out. And it was all he could do to break even two years out of three.”

Wyatt didn't know if that was true or not. It didn't really matter to him one way or the other.

“So what do you want from me?” he said.

“I want you to help Miss Kilkenny understand the wisdom of selling the Land Run. Find out how much she's willing to take. She'll end up with a nice little nest egg, and I'll be able to honor my brother's memory.”

An OU receiver shook the coverage and caught a bomb in the corner of the end zone. The band played the fight song for—­Wyatt's conservative estimate—­the one-­millionth time.

“Ms. Kilkenny will want a much bigger egg if she knows about the tax initiative,” Wyatt said. “Sorry. The
alleged
tax initiative.”

The groove between Eddy's eyebrows deepened. His lips disappeared. And then he recovered with a chuckle.

“We're still sitting here talking about this,” he said. “You know what that tells me? That tells me you're a businessman.”

Sitting there talking to Jeff Eddy—­Wyatt was going to need a hot shower with lots of soap. On the other hand, he knew that Candace would really, truly kill him if he spent all evening drinking beer at a football game and came back with nothing to show for it. Wyatt decided to play along.

“Do you know that old joke?” he said. “A man goes up to a lady, a very prim and proper lady, and he says, ‘Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?' I don't know what that would be nowadays, adjusted for inflation, but you get the idea. And the lady thinks about it and blushes, and finally she says, ‘Yes, I suppose I would.' And then the man says, ‘Okay, would you have sex with me for five dollars?' And the lady is just, like, terribly affronted. She says, ‘How dare you! What do you think I am?' And the man says, ‘Oh, we've already established what you are. Now we're just haggling over your price.' ”

Eddy grinned. “I'm sure we can come to an agreement.”

 

W
yatt fled the game at halftime, after promising—­for a figure to be determined later—­to help bring the interests of Jeff Eddy and Candace into their natural alignment. On the way back up I-­35, Wyatt had plenty of time to weigh the probabilities. Did Jeff Eddy's attempt to buy him off—­and shut him up about the new MAPS—­make it more likely that Eddy was behind what had happened to Candace so far? Or less?

Wyatt couldn't decide. He made it back to the city at about nine and drove around Bricktown. The area consisted of several square blocks of old warehouses east of downtown that had been renovated and converted into restaurants, clubs, shops. It was hopping tonight—­there was a Thunder game at the arena on the other side of Broadway—­and Wyatt knew that whoever had been in on the ground floor of the Bricktown MAPS development had made a killing.

Jeff Eddy wanted to get in on the ground floor of the new MAPS development. Wyatt didn't blame him for that. He blamed him for being such a sneaky, sleazy tool about it.

Wyatt ate dinner on Automobile Alley, a stretch of Broadway that long ago had been lined with car dealerships. Abandoned for decades, the historic old Art Deco showrooms had been converted to upscale restaurants and shops. The grass-­fed rib eye that Wyatt ordered was as good as anything he'd ever eaten in Vegas or L.A.

After dinner he headed over to the Land Run. There was a long line out front, but Fudge, the giant guy who worked the door, spotted Wyatt and waved him up.

“Yo!” he said. “What up, Mr. PI? Mr. P
I.
Mr. VI
P
I.”

“How's your swag, Fudge?” Wyatt said. “Are we talking legit or not?”

“Oh,
legit.
No
question.
” He bumped fists with Wyatt. “You see what happen last night?”

“I saw it.”

“Somebody turn all this shit upside
down.
I'm talking
upside
down. Took us
all
day get it all turned right side
up
again. I'm talking all
day.
”

“I'm on it,” Wyatt said. “Is the boss around?”

“Yeah. But let me ax you a question first, Mr. VIPI. You know why they call me Fudge?”

Wyatt suspected he did know. But he noticed a ­couple of girls at the front of the line who were listening in. Fudge had noticed them, too. Wyatt was happy to oblige.

“You know, I don't,” Wyatt said. “Why do they call you Fudge?”

“Because,” Fudge said for the benefit of the honeys, “I am dark and sweet and
no
woman can't get enough of me.”

The honeys giggled. Wyatt bumped fists again with Fudge as he stepped past.

Inside, the Land Run was packed and happily raucous as everyone waited for the next band of the night to take the stage. The crowd skewed white and youngish, with a lot of college-­age kids, but other and older demographics were represented to a surprising degree. There were hippies and bearded hipsters and barflies and yuppies and rednecks and a pair of elderly lesbians, holding hands. A white Sikh and a black cowboy.

The mix was probably different from what it had been in Wyatt's day. Hipsters, for example, had not yet been invented in 1986, and he spotted no girls now with 'Til Tuesday hair and eye shadow. But he was glad to see it was still a mix: Oklahomans from all walks of life brought together by a shared love of off-­the-­beaten-­path music played loud in a scruffy, intimate venue—­and adventurous enough to park their cars at night in a neighborhood like this one.

Wyatt remembered what O'Malley had called the Land Run: the Church of All Sorts.

He squeezed his way to the bar and caught the eye of the bartender. Dallas, with her elaborate, colorful tattoos and silver nose hoop. Tonight she had epic hair, a pompadour with a ponytail. Dark red lipstick, Cleopatra eyes.

“Hey there, you,” she said.

“Dallas. You're looking very rockabilly tonight.”

“That's the idea. You want a drink?” Her Oklahoma twang made it sound like
drank.
“Wyatt. Like the sheriff.”

“No thank you.”

“Your loss.”

“Don't be that way,” Wyatt said. “I feel like we can still make this relationship work.”

“Too late. I'm fixin' to move on with my life.”

She headed off with a toss of her ponytail. She pulled a ­couple of drafts and delivered them to the end of the bar. Banged four glasses down and hit them with ice, tonic, vodka, and lime wheels. Broke a twenty with one hand while with the other she hit two more glasses with ice and Jack Daniel's.

A minute later she worked her way back down the bar to where Wyatt was standing.

“I knew you'd be back,” he said.

“Guess I can't stay away.”
Cain't.
“You crack the case yet?”

“This close,” Wyatt said. “Here. Let me see that one.”

She let him have her forearm. Wyatt held it, he turned it this way and that.

“That's a tattoo of a phoenix, Dallas,” he said. “Rising from the ashes.”

“I know what it is. I designed it.”

“Did you?”

“I apprentice over at Ink & Roses in the Plaza District. Three more months and out I go, on my own.”

Wyatt traced the tail of the phoenix with his thumb. The tattoo had great color and detail. Every individual feather in the plumage was a different shade of red or yellow or green.

“A woman of many talents,” Wyatt said.

“Get a room, you two,” the grizzled old guy next to Wyatt growled. He had dyed black hair and a matching soul patch. He lifted his empty glass and rattled the ice cubes.

Wyatt gave Dallas her arm back, and she started making the old guy a fresh drink.

“You know where Candace is?” Wyatt said.

“Don't look now.”

Candace was up in the balcony, at the rail, glaring down at Wyatt. He made his way up the creaking wooden stairs.

“Stop flirting with my bartender,” Candace said. “Do that on your own time.”

“I'm not. And I have my own time?”

“No. Not until you figure out who's trying to screw up my life.”

He followed her to a booth at the far end of the balcony. The table was piled with stacks of invoices, inventory sheets, receipts. Half a dozen Red Bull empties and a plastic clamshell with the remains of a Caesar salad. A Disney Princesses coloring book.

Wyatt slid into the booth across from her. “Your office?”

“Mr. Eddy's, too,” Candace said. “He told me. He said this way he could keep an eye on everything. He said what fun was it owning a place like this if you couldn't listen to the music? He was such a sweet old dude. That's him.”

She pointed to the framed black-­and-­white photo that hung on the wall of the booth. It showed a kid barely out of his teens with a friendly, open face. Next to him stood a guy with an acoustic guitar who looked like a young Johnny Cash. Wyatt realized it
was
the young Johnny Cash.

“I left you like four messages,” Candace said. “Where were you all day? What if it was an emergency?”

“You would have said so. I was at the OU game with Jeff Eddy. Drinking beer in the crisp autumn breeze.”

Candace ignored the provocation and checked the incoming number that was making her phone buzz. She growled.

“What now?” she said into the phone. She listened. “No! It's not cool if they all come over! I said you could have just your boyfriend over.” She listened. “No! I said she should be in bed by
eight
-­thirty! She's five years old! Let me talk to Lily, please.”

Wyatt picked up a postcard with a picture of a sea turtle soaring past a coral garden. The most recent rub-­it-­in greeting from Lily's father, Candace's ex. The postmark was from Paia, Hawaii, stamped Tuesday, the day Wyatt had arrived in Oklahoma City.

“Maui is better then ever. It's always nice weather. Sabrina and I have a house on the beach now. One wall is all glass. My new job pays two times what the old one did. Life is good!—­Brandon.”

Wyatt put the postcard back on the table. Karlene had been so excited about moving to Hawaii. She was scheduled to leave on the Wednesday after the Friday she was murdered. Her airline ticket had been purchased back in June, and she carried it around in her purse. Whenever a customer or Mr. Bingham really pissed her off, she'd take the ticket out of her purse, give it a big wet smack of a kiss, and then put it back away.

“Hi, baby,” Candace said into the phone. “What's shaking? Did you brush your teeth yet? It's time for bed.”

Wyatt remembered how Grubb one time, teasing, had asked Karlene if she'd let
him
kiss her ticket to Hawaii, too. Karlene had laughed and said he could kiss
this.
Grubb had said, “Yeah, I wish!” Everyone hanging out around the concession stand, Wyatt and Tate and Janella and O'Malley, had thought that was the funniest exchange in the history of comedy.

The lights went down, and the crowd downstairs roared as the band took the stage. Wyatt remembered the Hüsker Dü show in the spring of 1986, the crowd in front of the stage so packed you could barely breathe, Wyatt giddy because his terrible fake ID had finally worked. Theresa stood on his left, Karlene on his right.

What shape would Karlene's life have taken, Wyatt wondered, if she'd been allowed to live it? Would she have settled forever in Hawaii or spent six months there before she returned to Oklahoma, homesick and broke? Would she have ended up marrying a tool like Jeff Eddy? Would she have a kid and an ex-­husband like Candace's who sent taunting postcards about his great life far away in paradise? Or would she be down on the dance floor of the Land Run right now, whipping her hair around like there was no tomorrow?

And Grubb, Theresa, Melody, O'Malley. Who would they be now, if they'd survived that night in the projection booth? What would they be? Where? Wyatt had tried hard over the years to resist this sort of speculation. He tried to remember the line from
Lear.
“That way madness lies.” Or more madness. A different kind.

The band downstairs was playing an old-­fashioned country-­roadhouse stomp. A guy with a stand-­up bass, a drummer with just a kick, a snare, and a cymbal, a female lead singer in red cowboy boots and a black net funeral veil.

Candace kissed Lily good night over the phone and hung up. She picked up the postcard Wyatt had been looking at.

“No way is Brandon's life that awesome,” she said. “Jerk. He's probably sleeping in his car on the beach. He's probably working at Burger King.”

“How long were you married?”

“Not long. I don't want to talk about that.”

“Does he pay child support?”

“I don't want his money. I don't want to ever think about him again.”

“It was that rocky?”

She sighed. “I picked the wrong dude. Okay?”

“You wouldn't be the first woman.”

“I thought he was a nice dude. He could be, when he wanted something.”

“When did you split up?”

“A ­couple of years ago.”

“Does Lily ask about him?”

“No. Not really. I don't know. I don't want to talk about him. That's the past. Now, shut up about it, I'm serious.”

She did look serious, in a way Wyatt had never seen her look before.

The woman onstage downstairs could sing. She was doing justice to a cover of Springsteen's “I'm on Fire.” She was setting the song on fire.

“So what's
your
story?” Candace said. “Do you have kids? I don't know anything about you.”

“I'm a mile wide and an inch deep. That's all you need to know.”

“Why don't you have a girlfriend?”

That surprised him. “Who says I don't have a girlfriend?”

Candace leaned across the table and thwacked Wyatt in the sternum with her knuckle. “You were watching football and drinking beer?” she said.

“I was gathering intelligence.” Wyatt told her about Jeff Eddy's proposal. “So all I need to do now is convince you to sell and find out what lowball offer you're willing to take.”

“I! Am! Not! Selling!”

“Really? You never mentioned.”

Candace glanced down at the woman onstage, then back at Wyatt. “Does all this mean Mr. Eddy's brother probably is or isn't the one screwing with me?” she said. “I can't decide.”

“Neither can I,” Wyatt said. “Now, tell me about Lyle Finn.”

“Who?”

“Lyle Finn, your neighbor, lead singer of the Barking Johnsons.”

“Oh! The goof in the kilt.”

“That's the one.” Wyatt doubted it was connected to his case—­the little argument he'd happened to witness between Finn and his manager on the loading dock—­but it was always best to leave no stone unturned. Especially when you had so few stones to turn over in the first place. “Are you aware he creates functional erotic art?”

“Functional erotic art? How does that work?”

“Gradually, I guess,” Wyatt said, “and then all at once.”

“That goof! I had to deal with him, like, my first week here. He was totally screwing Mr. Eddy over! He'd play a show here and make Mr. Eddy give him all the door and half the bar on top of that. Because, I don't know, he's this supposedly famous rock star and he was doing Mr. Eddy a big favor? But he's not that famous a rock star!”

“You told him that?” Wyatt didn't have to guess how Lyle Finn would have taken that news.

“Sure. And none of his fans drink! Not the hard-­core hippie ones. They just get baked out in the parking lot before the show. So the bar take is, like, almost nothing to start with. I told him he could have half the door and none of the bar. Take it or leave it.”

Wyatt picked up an empty Red Bull can and tossed it at Candace. She ducked out of the way.