The Long and Faraway Gone (24 page)

“You know,” she said, “the
Oklahoman
archives are all digital now. Most ­people do it that way.”

“In this particular instance, Becky,” Wyatt said, “I'm not most ­people.”

He waited until she left and then spun through the first seven months of 1986. Yes, digital would have been more efficient, but he wanted as much of the full newspaper experience as possible—­the original dot-­screen photos and smudged ink, the widows and orphans, the crooked jump columns.

He reached the issue of Friday, August 15, 1986. The day of the robbery. The big front-­page news that day was that the city council had annexed land for a new water-­supply line.

At the back of the sports section—­beneath the much larger schedules for the multiplexes, down next to tiny ads for the Blue Moon Saloon strip club and the Bombay Wig, Costume, and Lingerie Shoppe—­were the show times for the Pheasant Run Twin theater.

One Crazy Summer,
with John Cusack and Demi Moore.
The Fly,
with Jeff Goldblum.
“Bargain matinee half price every show 4–6
P.M.
”

Wyatt had to spin two issues forward, to August 17, for the first article on the massacre—­the pre-­Internet world, when news wasn't news yet if it happened after the paper had been put to bed for the night. The initial coverage took up the entire front page of the
Daily Oklahoman.
A photo of the Pheasant Run mall ran above the fold, photos of the victims below it. Grainy high-­school-­yearbook shots of O'Malley, Theresa, Grubb, Melody, and Karlene.

The photos looked nothing like them. Grubb, his hair parted on the side, a grave expression, could have been the president of the chess club. Theresa, who never smiled, was smiling. O'Malley, who always smiled, wasn't. Melody, the photo taken before she'd discovered cornrows, looked like a young Donna Summer. Karlene wore glasses.

They all looked so unbelievably
young,
like children. Wyatt wondered why the newspaper hadn't been able to find more recent photos.

The photo of Mr. Bingham was the only one that truly captured its subject. A candid shot. He wore a short-­sleeved dress shirt and looked only a little less sour and puckered than usual. He held something in his arms—­a bag of groceries, maybe—­that had been cropped out of the picture.

Wyatt spun through issues of the
Oklahoman
until he found what he was looking for. In early October, a day after the killers had been gunned down in Arizona, the newspaper ran a double-­truck spread that included a wide-­angle photo of the theater's back parking lot. The auditorium exit doors were the focus of the shot, but you could see the Dumpster in the background—­you could see, clearly, that the Dumpster was angled toward the building, no longer parallel, just the way Wyatt remembered. Grubb would have seen the killers approaching.

So. Say there was an inside man. Say someone gave the killers the keys to the theater, someone the police didn't know about.

Who? As far as Wyatt knew, only Mr. Bingham had keys to the glass front doors. The mall security guards didn't. Mall management didn't. The movie theater operated under a special lease—­it was a sovereign tenant, the self-­important term Mr. Bingham liked to use. The Vatican City of the Pheasant Run Mall.

The janitors didn't have keys either. They had to wait every morning until Mr. Bingham arrived to let them in.

The question, then, had to be this: Who had
access
to the keys? Who could have borrowed or stolen them and had copies made?

Mr. Bingham kept all his keys on a single ring—­the key to his office, the cash box, the ticket boxes, the projection booth, the cabinet where he locked the movie poster one-­sheets, the glass front doors. Those and a dozen others. The crew always joked about it, how the weight of the keys in Mr. Bingham's pocket dragged his pants down, how he was constantly pausing to hitch them back up.

Almost always, he kept the keys with him.
Almost
always. During an extra-­hairy weekend rush, when Mr. Bingham had to work the box office so Karlene or Janella could help out in the concession stand, he'd stash his keys in the drawer beneath one of the cash registers. That way the girls wouldn't have to bug him every time they needed to make a run to storage for napkins or straws. Sometimes the keys stayed in the drawer for thirty or forty minutes at a time.

Was that long enough for someone to grab the ring of keys, make copies, return them? No. But you wouldn't have to take the entire ring—­you could take only the keys to the front doors, which Mr. Bingham probably wouldn't notice missing until the very end of the night. You'd have to figure out a way to get the keys back
on
the ring. You'd have to plan for a particularly busy weekend, when there were three different rushes, at six, eight, and ten. Take the keys at six, make copies during your break, put the keys back on the ring at eight or ten.

Maybe. It wasn't implausible.

Wyatt took out his notebook. He wrote down the name of every theater employee who had not been working the night of the massacre.

The list wasn't long. The Pheasant Run Twin was small even by the standards of the day, with only two screens and auditoriums that held maybe two hundred ­people each. On a slow day or night, three employees could run the place—­a cashier to sell and tear tickets, one person to work the concession stand, the projectionist.

On the day of the massacre, Tate and Janella had worked the matinee shift and clocked out at six. They were gone even before the old lady rammed the Dumpster with her Cadillac.

The matinee projectionist, Haygood, had also clocked out at six. Ingram, the night projectionist, never stayed a minute longer than he had to—­you could hear him thudding down the stairs almost before the last reel of the night stopped spinning. Wyatt couldn't remember precisely, but he knew that Ingram was gone before Grubb even started the auditorium sweep—­at least thirty minutes before the killers showed up.

Tate. Janella. Haygood. Ingram. At the time of the robbery, there had been ten employees of the Pheasant Twin: the five dead, the four living, and Wyatt.

He switched off the microfiche reader—­the fan panting, the metal growing warm from the lamp inside. He tried to get his head around the possibility that someone he'd known, someone he'd seen every day for months, had been working with the killers.

Tate. Janella. Haygood. Ingram.

On the way to the library, Wyatt had driven up Northwest Expressway. On the north side of the curve, near Classen, was a development of big-­box chain stores—­Old Navy, Walmart, Babies “R” Us, a Nordstrom Rack. In the eighties, that had been the site of the abandoned Belle Isle power plant, its smokestack visible for miles around. Steel plates welded over the doors and lower windows had enticed local teenagers to break in. Rumor had it that the power plant was haunted by the ghosts of kids who'd plunged to their deaths in the darkness while exploring the massive, derelict building.

Wyatt himself had never been inside. One afternoon in May, though, after a late-­spring thunderstorm, Tate bought a ­couple of forty-­ounce Budweiser bottles from the Circle K on Western and took Wyatt four-­wheeling on the muddy grounds of the power plant, in his old red Ford F-­150. It was a blast. Wyatt didn't remember where O'Malley had been at the time. If O'Malley had been there, he would have insisted they explore the abandoned power plant. He would have figured out a way to get in.

Tate and Wyatt had gotten along well, but they weren't tight the way Wyatt was tight with O'Malley or the way Tate was tight with Grubb. Wyatt couldn't think of another time when it had been just him and Tate hanging out together, none of the others around.

Was it Tate who made copies of the front-­door keys and gave them to the killers? But why would Tate have them murder Grubb, his best friend, and leave Wyatt alive?

Janella's attitude toward Wyatt, most of the time, was one of general annoyance. That was her attitude, most of the time, toward everyone. She was a tiny wisp of a girl, but she could drink anyone except O'Malley under the table. Her relationship with Melody, the other black girl at the theater, was prickly. Janella had much lighter skin than Melody, and straightened her hair. Melody had the cornrows and went to church every Sunday.

Janella liked Wyatt, she tolerated him. They'd even made out a few times on break, getting moderately hot and heavy, the winter after Wyatt started work at the theater. More from boredom, though, than anything else. If Janella was the one who gave the killers the keys to the theater, why would she tell them to spare Wyatt and not Melody? Janella's relationship with Melody was prickly, but they were like sisters.

After the murders Wyatt never saw or talked to Tate or Janella again. He didn't try to contact them, and they, as far as he knew, didn't try to contact him. Maybe they found the prospect of meeting again as unbearable as he did.

If you set aside Tate and Janella, that left only Haygood and Ingram, the projectionists. They were surly old union guys in their fifties, heavy smokers, limpers both. Haygood was white, Ingram black. When they arrived for a shift, they limped across the lobby without making eye contact and headed straight upstairs to the booth. O'Malley called Haygood and Ingram the phantoms of the opera. He claimed that he'd seen the inside lid of Haygood's toolbox, and it was decorated with full-­color close-­up beaver shots that Haygood had clipped from nudie magazines.

Ingram, the other projectionist, had a crush on Melody. He'd come downstairs every now and then when she was working, when he knew she was trapped behind the candy counter and couldn't flee. He told stories about his time in the army, in Germany. Best days of his life. The bane of his existence now was his wife's enormous standard poodle, which would climb onto the sofa and refuse to get off.

“If that damn dog
standard,
” Wyatt remembered Ingram saying once, “I never wanna see no
jumbo
size.”

Haygood didn't know that Wyatt existed. Ingram only noticed Wyatt when he needed someone to fill his thermos with Sprite.

Wyatt looked at the list.
Tate. Janella. Haygood. Ingram.
That was everyone. And Steve Herpes. Wyatt had almost overlooked the snotty rich kid Mr. Bingham had hired at the beginning of the summer. His real last name was Hurley, but that had been quickly modified when everyone realized how snotty he was. Steve Herpes had quit around the middle of July, long before the murders, but he would have had access to the keys before that. He would have had even better access than the rest of them, since he was always in Mr. Bingham's office, sucking up to the boss. Everyone feared that Mr. Bingham was grooming Steve Herpes to be assistant manager.

Wyatt hadn't given Steve Herpes much thought over the years. He was tall and square-­jawed and looked like a lifeguard. Karlene, Wyatt remembered, had been interested in him for about a minute, until Steve Herpes casually mentioned three times in a single conversation that he drove a Porsche that his parents had given him for his birthday. How it cost a fortune to insure, how it didn't handle well on ice, how the cops were always pulling him over for speeding, even when he wasn't.

Karlene twisted a strand of hair around her finger. She did her best dumb blonde.

“Is a Porsche one of those cute little cars from Yugoslavia?” she said. “I love those.”

Really, though, everyone had tried at first to welcome Steve Herpes into the tribe. But whenever Tate or O'Malley asked him to come along to the park or the pool after work, he always had something better to do—­a party to attend, friends to meet.

Friends
to meet. Putting a point on it, that the ­people he had to work with were just the ­people he had to work with.

Steve Herpes refused to take his turn with the popcorn machine. Officially, the concession girls were supposed to clean the popcorn machine, but it was such hot, nasty work that the doormen always pitched in—­Wyatt would clean the bin, for example, while Melody cleaned the kettle.

“Not my job,” Steve Herpes would say if any of the girls asked him for help.

Most grievously, he would check out his own square-­jawed reflection in the glass of the framed, outdated one-­sheets in the lobby—­
What's Up Doc?, Rocky, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
—­when he thought no one was watching.

So they called him Steve Herpes and parked too close to his Porsche and spent the long, empty hours in the lobby giving him shit.

Wyatt had given him as much shit as anyone else. Maybe more. And yet Wyatt had been spared. So again:
Why?

He flipped his notebook shut. Too many questions. Too many paths that looped around and left him back where he'd started. But still there remained the strong possibility that
someone
had given the killers the keys to the theater. With luck, Bill Haskell's contact at the OCPD would be able to point Wyatt in the right direction.

It was almost one. Haskell still hadn't called. Wyatt swung by Whole Foods for a rotisserie chicken and drove to his uncle's house. Once again his uncle was sitting on the porch, even though the temperature had dipped and there was a real nip to the wind. In another week or so, the leaves on the old trees along the street would burst into flame: scarlet, saffron, goldenrod. And then down they'd come.

“Mikey!”

Wyatt shook his uncle's hand. “How have you been, Uncle Pete?”

“As good as can be expected under the circumstances.”

“What about some lunch?”

“What about it?” his uncle said, and they both laughed.

Wyatt was on his way to the kitchen with the chicken when his phone rang.

“Don't tell me you forgot,” Candace said.

“Of course not.” Wyatt tried to remember. Lunch? Yes. Candace had invited him to lunch. Shit. “I'm on my way now. I'm pulling in to your driveway as we speak.”